Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), Britain’s largest asset manager, has been selling off stocks and buying bonds on the judgment that the Bank of England (BoE) will be forced to raise interest rates so high that a “significant” recession will be unavoidable.
“There’s a gap between the number of days that employees would like to work from home and the number that their employers are planning for them,” Mathias Dolls, deputy director of Germany’s Ifo Center for Macroeconomics and Surveys, told a press briefing on release of a recent survey on the subject.
The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress last year, offered more than $260 billion in tax and other incentives for green energy manufacturing projects in the U.S.
Oil producers will struggle to meet demand during the second half of this year, especially as demand in China and India continues to rise, Joseph McMonigle, secretary-general of the International Energy Forum, said in a CNBC interview last week during the G20 economic summit.
Higher interest rates and rising inflation, plus the cheap money flow that governments pumped into economies to artificially drive up equity markets and economies are causing companies in many sectors to lay off employees.
Corporate loans in “distress”—a pre-default phase in which businesses struggle to gather the assets to make debt payments—now total $500 billion, Bloomberg has calculated, the most since 2008, early in the Great Recession.
The number of office buildings burdened with troubled loans, or already repossessed by lenders, jumped 36 percent in this year’s second quarter from the first, MSCI Real Assets reported.
The European Central Bank (ECB) should continue to raise interest rates into the future, bank president Christine Lagarde said in a 27 June statement at a financial conference in Portugal.
Inflation across the 20 countries sharing the euro currency fell to 5.5 percent in June from 6.1 percent in May, beating economists’ forecast of 5.6 percent in a Reuters poll.
Through June, this year’s initial public stock offerings (IPOs) and corporate buyouts and takeovers are worth $1 trillion less than the value of those deals made during the same period last year, Bloomberg reported.