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World economy 1st August 2012

Business investment rate nearly stable at 20.6% in the euro area

The euro zone’s doggedness showed up again in the latest quarterly European sector accounts released by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, and the European Central Bank. From January to March of 2012, compared with the last three months of 2011, the business investment rate remained nearly stable in the euro area and fell slightly in the wider European Union. Also, the business profit share even rose slightly in the euro area, as wage costs remained…

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World economy 1st August 2012

The US is not Japan, JP Morgan argues

MADRID | Three years have passed since the US took hold in mid-2009 of something of an economic recovery. The green in the green shoots has been paler than first thought, though. JP Morgan analysts in Spain released today a note saying that, by GDP per capita standards, we are witnesses of the weakest rebound the US has lived since World War Second. In the JP Morgan chart, populations has…

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World economy 31st July 2012

Obama: Europe has cronic wound but the euro will survive

“I don’t think ultimately that the Europeans will let the Euro unravel, but they are going to have to take some decisive steps,” US President Barack Obama said in a fundraiser event Monday night held in a New York high end hotel. Only four months before the U.S. election, Euro worries are inevitably playing a major role on this side of the Atlantic. Any worsening in the Euro zone situation…

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World economy 27th July 2012

“Eurozone’s institutional failure does not allow it to deal with financial crises”

Economist Ricardo R. Reis expects “better policymaking from the European authorities now.” Originally from Portugal, Reis teaches at Columbia University, he is a former graduate from the London School of Economics and Harvard Ph.D and has worked extensively on inflation dynamics and monetary and fiscal policy, including evaluation of fiscal stimulus programs. He gives his take on the current economic turmoil for our readers in the first of a summer…

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World economy 27th July 2012

Energy: China’s Achilles’ heel?

BEIJING | China is thirsty of energy. It’s the world’s biggest consumer of energy and the second consumer of oil. The world’s biggest country needs energy more than anything in order to keep the engine of growth working at high speed. Furthermore, development and urbanisation plans might put their dependency on foreign resources to the brink due to an increasing need of energy to power its vast urban areas. So,…

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World economy 25th July 2012

The United States: diminishing growth

By CaixaBank research team, in Barcelona | The US economy is leaving behind its vigorous start to the year and is on way to a weaker scenario than the consensus had expected at the end of April, after the publication of the gross domestic product (GDP) flash estimate for the first quarter. The main reason for this weaker tone lies in the loss of dynamism in the labour market’s recovery….

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World economy 23rd July 2012

The bursting of the war bubble looms over the defence industry

An unwritten rule seems to warrant that US defence spending is kept immune to the ups and downs of the nation's GDP. The extraordinary dimensions of the current economic downturn, nevertheless, is testing its past resilience to any sort of moderation. Public investment in military affairs has largely been the result of foreign policy and global strategy, government cabinets since 2001 would surely protest from Washington. But a federal deficit…

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World economy 20th July 2012

Goodbye to the American Golden retirement?

NEW YORK | Times are tough for pensions. Retirement plans are not golden anymore. After the crisis, U.S. companies started to get rid of many pension funds or are allocating less money for them. And while the market has substantially recovered from the 2009 low, pension funds portfolios as well as supplemental savings and retirement accounts for individuals remain significantly smaller than they were at their peak. Last year, Standard…

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World economy 19th July 2012

Bernanke’s speech on Europe: reading the tea leaves

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…

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World economy 17th July 2012

British inflation draws a faltering economy

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….