NEW YORK | Federal Reserve’s chairman Ben Bernanke attended his semi-annual monetary policy report to Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday, insisting that the Fed remains in close contact with European authorities but the alarms of spillover are still on. “I don’t think they [Europe leaders] are close to having a long-term solution that will solve the problem and until they find those long-term solutions, we’re going to continue to see…
LONDON | Since the consumer price index began to record UK’s month on month inflation back in 1996, the downturn experienced in the clothing and footwear section from May to June this year has doubled the next largest decrease. The data, released Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics, brought inflation from 2.8 percent to 2.4 percent, while the retail price index fell, too, from 3.1 percent to 2.8 percent….
Depicted more often than not these days as the number 1 enemy of the global economic recovery, even we at The Corner cannot help but wonder the big what-if question: couldn't the European Monetary Union just manage to orderly dismantle itself before it causes further damages? After checking the figures from the Review of the International Role of the Euro paper by the European Central Bank, the answer is that…
By valenciaplaza.com | How long will it take for the euro zone to finally set its mechanisms and tackle its imbalances? The euro country members only started to do some serious work in the last summit, said Marc Garrigasait, president of Koala Capital Sicav, in a conversation with VP. What feelings do you go through while watching your stock market monitors? I've never lived through a period in which not only…
Humberside-based air transport business Eastern Airways Europe said Thursday its future expansion plans are now backed up after securing refinancing from Santander Corporate Banking. Eastern Airways Europe is a regional air transport business operating in the UK and across Europe. The business was founded in 1997 as a service for oil and gas workers living in the UK and working offshore. Since then, Eastern Airways has evolved to provide transport operations…
By CaixaBank research team, in Barcelona | The upswing exceeded expectations with a first quarter GDP that grew by 1.0% quarter-on-quarter and 2.6% year-on-year. This momentarily places Japan at the head of advanced economies in terms of growth. However, the forecast for the whole of 2012 hardly reaches 2.5%, as the composition of the national accounts raises doubts regarding the sustainability of the upswing. Unusually, the growth of the first…
By CaixaBank research team, in Barcelona | Of the events occurring recently on the world economic scene, three have significantly affected the current fate of Brazil's economy. On the one hand, the confirmation of China's economic slowdown in the first quarter; on the other, the progress made in correcting commodities markets and, lastly, more intense tensions in the euro area's debt markets are causing a marked upswing in global aversion…
BEIJING | The option that Chinese economy is in a more severe slowdown than the one officially acknowledged has always been in the international community's subconscious. Economists and experts have been aware of a well known, but not so evident, truth where the usually optimistic official data might not be completely reliable. The debate is open, making it difficult to identify the actual reach of the economic consequences born out…
By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | Intermoney chief economist José Carlos Díez considers that a monetary union with stability and credibility will not be possible unless there is a surrender of sovereignty. He adds that it is not only Germany the one that must be flexible in its position, but all member countries alike. Can be the Thursday-to-Friday summit considered as “the definitive” or will it result into a new…
NEW YORK | Last week 15 major banks, including the nation’s three largest institutions, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, which together have more than $6.4 trillion in assets, suffered credit ratings cuts by Moody’s. No matter their efforts to strengthen their operations since they received a warning in February, their core businesses still present structural weaknesses, the ratings agency said. Bank of America, which owns Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup,…