World economy

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Can the euro mess up the US economy? Yes, it can!

By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | What I would like to do here is bringing a magnifying glass on to a recent lapse of time and see if the fourth euro crisis (yes, I said fourth) has somehow cooled the US economy down. It’s possible, you know. In the US, the authorities are beginning to see signs of how the economic activity is loosing steam, such as in weekly claims for unemployment…


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JP Morgan believes Wall Street is set to shrink with or without Obama

LONDON | The US 2012 election result can do little to change the fate of Wall Street under the extreme pressures of a global credit crunch and a relentless economic crisis. In a paper issued Monday by JP Morgan Asset Management, the investing company said that the financial sector will likely shrink after having become quite large a share of the country’s economy. “One side effect of that process, lower secondary…


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Emerging markets, opportunity or trouble?

By CBRE’s Eduardo Fernández-Cuesta, in Madrid | In a time of extraordinary global economic and political uncertainty, multinational corporations have focused their growth plans in the opportunities offered by emerging markets. Indeed, they are countries attractive for growth and increasingly popular. Turkey, for example, grew by over 8% last year, becoming one of the fastest growing economies worldwide along with Brazil and Mexico, which has based its spectacular development in recent years…


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Kirchner’s checkmate to Repsol threatens foreign investment in Argentina

By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | President Cristina Kirchner may have got her way as she finally decided to expropriate Repsol’s YPF unit. The Argentine government confirmed the nationalisation of a 51% stake in YPF, because by decree it considered the oil firm’s activities of ‘public interest’. Tuesday morning, the president of Repsol Antonio Brufau declared that this decision is “illegitimate and unjustifiable, an act preceded by a campaign of harassment, of…


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NYT’s punch to Merkel because of Spain

NEW YORK | A big amount of pain in the Spanish economy could have been avoided. But the Germany authorities chose not to. This is pretty much the line of thought that The New York Times has been sharing with its public for months. So far, the excessive “German-led mismanagement of the euro-zone crisis” has been the focus of as many op-eds as the war in Afghanistan or the US healthcare…


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Even UK unions might welcome London councils’ joint pension fund

LONDON | A proposed London Pensions Mutual would attempt to square the circle of austere consolidation and need for growth. The mega-pension fund could have assets in excess of £30 billion. It could also allocate up to 7.5% or £2.25 billion of its portfolio towards local infrastructure projects, taking advantage of changes announced by the coalition government in Downing Street to facilitate private investors’ and pension funds’ participation in UK infrastructure…


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Barclays: Federal Reserve too hopeful on US productivity

MADRID | Analysts at Barclays said Tuesday in a report that they are less than convinced that the productive capacity of the US economy, the famous output gap, is as large as the Federal Reserve believes. And the consequences of this realisation spell further trouble for any global economic recovery. According to Barclays experts in Madrid, once investors acknowledge that China’s GDP is slowing and that the stimulus measures may…


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UK commercial real estate as depressed as the economy

LONDON | The retail property market in the UK continues to struggle, as demand for retail premises stuttered again in the first three months of 2012. This lack of interest in the sector combined with growing availability resulted in a further drop in rental expectations, the latest RICS UK Commercial Market Survey showed on Tuesday. Interest from potential tenants of retail space continued to fall in the first quarter of the…


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A conflict with Iran is in no one interest

By Carlos Días Guell, in Madrid | In the Middle East, drums of war have for months now been sounding and this has triggered potential risks that could push oil prices higher than ever seen before. The worst scenario, though the least likely, would be one in which the tensions between Iran and the West rise to such an extent that the Strait of Hormuz is closed and oil supplies cut. The last…


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What do GDP rates matter without happiness?

MADRID | A calm breeze in the midst of so much economic shock and just-about-fine Spanish bond auctions, whose effects will probably still ripple beyond Easter with the usual euro contagion talk. Let us pause for a moment and read a list of the happiest and satisfied peoples in the world. It is a huge report, a pile of 158 pages full of charts, notes in fine print and details on…