The United Arab Emirates (UAE), OPEC’s third largest oil producer, has quit the 65-year-old oil cartel due to long-standing tensions with Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s dominant member, and frustrations with the group’s policy of dictating each members’ limits on oil production.
JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, SMBC, and other major banks that have made gigantic loans to cloud service providers such as CoreWeave and Oracle are trying to entice other lenders to share the risk but are having trouble persuading them, people familiar told the Financial Times.
Asian nations, heavily reliant on oil and gas imports from Gulf nations, face the prospect of continuing price increases and scarcities of fuels, which increase the chance that the region will fall into a major economic crisis, the Financial Times reported.
Key factors are converging to sink the German economy into recession, according to a report by Russian news service RT.
In March, inflation in Germany and Spain ticked up 0.1 of a percentage point, accelerating price increases to their fastest annual rate in two years.
In this year’s first quarter, the economy of the 20-country Eurozone grew 0.1 percent from 2025’s final three months. It posted an annualized GDP increase of 0.6 percent.
German investors’ confidence in current economic conditions is its lowest since December 2022, according to the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment, a monthly survey by the country’s ZEW economic research organization.
Cash-strapped European governments have raised taxes on wages to their highest rates in almost 10 years to collect quick money to fund business and household aid programs, as soaring energy bills squeeze consumer, business, and national budgets.
Confidence in the U.K.’s economic prospects among British households fell four points last month to -25 in a survey by global research firm GfK.
After a brief slump at the onset of the Iran War, the U.K.’s private sector has rebounded, according to S&P Global’s purchasing managers index (PMI) for April.