Europe’s banks should set aside greater reserves to cover bad loans, regulators should require investment funds to hold more cash to cover a surge in withdrawals, and the European Central Bank (ECB) should not delay in beginning to sell its €5-trillion bond hoard next year, bank vice-president Luis de Guindos said in a statement accompanying the ECB’s semi-annual review of the region’s financial stability.
This is the headline on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal: “OPEC + Weighs Pumping More Oil.”
Interest-rate futures markets are betting that Chile’s central bank will chop more than 5 percentage points from its current 11.25-percent rate by the end of next year, according to Bloomberg.
Validating analysts’ our forecasts cited in “Future Rate Hikes Will Be Smaller” in this issue, on 21 November the Bank of Israel (BoI) increased its base interest rate by a half-point, not the three-quarters of a point that analysts had expected.
Central banks’ future rate hikes will be smaller, analysts say, because recent large rate boosts are showing signs of taming inflation—and because signs are growing that a worldwide economic recession is looming.
Inflation and interest rate hikes are causing companies in many sectors to lay off employees. To illustrate the employment trends and the socioeconomic implications, each week we list job losses.
As forecast, the Merger and Acquisition trend which we have been long reporting would peak when the Federal Reserve would aggressively raise interest rates and cut off the cheap money supply.
In dollar terms, the value of China’s exports in October fell 0.3 percent, year on year, falling far short of the 4.3-percent increase that analysts had predicted, due to the U.S. and European Union buying less.
The number of homes sold in October in metro Toronto, Canada’s largest city, fell by 49.1 percent from a year earlier, with the number of homes for sale falling to a level last seen in 2020, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board reported last week.