AS WE FORECAST: CHINA’S ECONOMY GROWS 8.1 PERCENT IN 2021 While much of the world was downgrading China’s GDP growth estimates for 2021, the Trends Journal had forecast it would grow by 8 percent. We were 0.1 percent off: China’s economy grew 8.1 percent overall in 2021 on the strength of its exports to a...
Tag: jan 18 2022
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SPOTLIGHT: INFLATION
INFLATION IN OECD COUNTRIES TOUCHES 25-YEAR HIGH Inflation across member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes most of the world’s 37 richest countries, ran at 5.8 percent in November, compared to 1.2 percent a year earlier, according to OECD figures released last week. It was inflation’s fastest annual pace...
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GERMAN ECONOMY SHRINKING. DANGER AHEAD
Germany’s economy contracted 0.5 to 1 percent during 2021’s final three months, according to a 14 January announcement by the nation’s statistics agency. Supply-chain turmoil, surging prices for raw materials, and the economic weakness of China, Germany’s largest trading partner, torpedoed the country’s manufacturing sector, especially vehicle manufacturers, upon which Germany’s economic performance depends significantly....
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GLOBAL GROWTH SLOWDOWN: GET READY
COVID’s Omicron strain, supply-line chaos, labor shortages, and the end of government and central-bank stimulus programs will combine to slow global economic growth this year, the World Bank has predicted. The world’s economic output grew by 5.5 percent in 2021, the best post-recession performance in 80 years, the bank said in its semi-annual Global Economic...
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2020 GLOBAL DEBT SET RECORD: WORST IS YET TO COME
By the end of 2020, global debt surged the most in a single year since World War Two and reached a record $226 trillion, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported. In 2020, global debt added 26 percentage points to reach 256 percent of the world’s economic output, according to updated data from the IMF’s Global...
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SPOTLIGHT: BIGS GET BIGGER
BIGS GET BIGGER: THE METAVERSE WORLD Today, tech giant Microsoft will shovel out $68.7 billion in-cash to gobble up video game giant Activision Blizzard. Getting bigger and bigger and expanding into the meta and digital world, with a market cap of nearly $3 trillion, Microsoft, paid $7.5 billion for game maker Bethesda, last year, bought...
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AUTO SALES WILL ADD 3.4 PERCENT THIS YEAR, DEALERS PREDICT
The U.S. auto market will grow 3.4 percent this year to 15.4 million cars and trucks, the 16,000-member National Automobile Dealers Association said, as the shortage of computer chips continues to impinge on production. The chip shortage reduced dealers’ inventories by 59 percent in December, compared to a year before, and will continue to cut...
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OMICRON RESTRICTIONS SINK DECEMBER RESTAURANT SALES
In December, sales slipped at 98 percent of U.S. restaurants, according to an Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC) poll of 1,169 eateries around the country. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said their sales had tanked by half, while 80 percent said that the Omicron surge had shortened their hours of operation. The impact was worst among businesses...
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MORE RATE INCREASES AHEAD THAN NOW EXPECTED, DIMON SAYS
The U.S. Federal Reserve will raise interest rates as many as six or seven times this year to fight inflation, not the three or four that the Fed has signaled, in the view of Jamie Dimon, CEO and executive chair of J.P. Morgan Chase, the U.S.’s biggest bank. “I grew up in a world where...
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HOUSING MARKET TUMBLES. HOW LOW WILL IT GO?
The U.S. housing market has succumbed to its own excess: December booked 11 percent fewer sales than a year earlier, the lowest number since June 2020, because the number of homes on the market fell 19 percent, year on year, to the lowest on record, according to online brokerage Redfin. The largest declines were in...