BEIJING | The question on whether China’s economy is expanding or contracting is like answering whether the glass is half full or half empty. The positive official reading signals that there’s no need to worry. With its PMI index calculated after a sample of more than 800 big (and state-owned) companies, PMI is on the rise and above the 50% for the fifth consecutive month. Conversely, HSBC’s reading doesn’t seem to…
LONDON | The Confederation of British Industry said Thursday that household spending will remain subdued, with weak wage growth and unemployment rising to a peak of 2.86 million in the first quarter of 2013. The CBI published its latest quarterly forecast in a somehow hopeful tone, though, voicing prospects of inflation improving next year with further falls, and disposable incomes beginning to recover. The business association pointed out that recent…
Energy consumption in Spain during the past four weeks brought gas demand back to positive figures and stopped further falls in electricity. Red Eléctrica and Enagás released electricity and gas demand data in April and analysts in the financial City of Madrid welcomed the better-than expected news. Electricity demand was slightly on the recovery path with a -0.9 percent and a -1.8 percent annually accumulated decrease. As for electricity generated…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | Here’s one more example of how politics constantly enters the economics arena with the firm intention of interfering in some way or another. That was the time in which the US Republican conservatives tried to grill the then Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker when he wanted to cool the high inflation of those days down. Let me quote these few lines: “Secretary Regan mustered…
Bad news for those in Brussels and Berlin who expected higher competitiveness through austerity budgets. Eurostat said today that in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared with the previous three months, business investment rates decreased in both the euro area and the European Union. Furthermore, official data also showed that in the euro area, the business profit share declined as wage costs increased while value added fell slightly. From October…
NEW YORK | The debate between austerity or growth to cure Europes illness is in full swing. Austerians are, though, losing support. A consensus is growing that current cuts alone aren’t likely to tackle the euro zone crisis. For US celebrity economist and director of the Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs, “Fiscal policy alone won’t save Europe,” he said in the launch of the Center on Global Economic Governance at Columbia…
LONDON | Although less than 0.5% of homes in Britain would be affected by the increase in the stamp duty rate for multi-million pound homes announced in the 2012 budget, according to research by Lloyd, the very top end of the market just hit a historic high in sales. Does it need cool down? The total number of sales of properties that cost at least one million pounds in Great Britain was…
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…
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…
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…