Personal consumption is Spain and the US has begun to slow down at a delicate moment in view of the demanding valuations in the credit market after January’s rally. In this context, and after a new warning from the UK flash PMIs, the second one came on Thursday. The country that accounted for most of the growth in employment in the EU during 1H22, Spain, saw its unemployment rate rise…
The Chinese government is looking to consumption as the “main engine of growth” for the Chinese economy this year, mainly as a result of the abandonment of China’s “zero covid” policy. Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, said this weekend that the consumption of the country’s 1.4 billion people is “a key step to expand domestic demand”.
ifo | “High inflation rates have driven the German economy into a winter recession.” This is how Timo Wollmershäuser, Head of Forecasts at ifo, responded when Germany’s Federal Statistical Office reported that economic output in the fourth quarter of 2022 had fallen by 0.2 percent. The Federal Statistical Office had originally expected growth to be flat, based on provisional figures. “The usual definition of a recession is when gross domestic…
CdM | The Bank of Canada hiked +25 bps to 4.5%, the eighth in a row, and intends to pause to see the impact of its monetary tightening in the face of a slowing economy (consumption, housing sector) and moderating inflation. This pause in rate hikes, the first by one of the major central banks, suggests that they consider current rate levels to be restrictive, but in any case say…
Técnicas Reunidas (TRE) has won a contract to engineer an ammonia, urea, nitric acid and ammonium nitrate production complex owned by Kazazot, Kazakhstan’s leading fertiliser company. With a total planned investment of around $1 billion, the plant will be located in the town of Aktau, capital of the Mangystau province, in the southwest of the country. Técnicas Reunidas will initially carry out the engineering of the facility under a FEED-OBE…
Alicia Garcia Herrero & Jianwei Xu (Natixis) | Chinese economy ended 2022 by growing only 3% YoY, with the last quarter GDP slowing further to 2.9% YoY. The figure was finally much lower than the target set during the Two Sessions by the Chinese government mainly because of the heavy mobility restrictions imposed under zero-Covid policies since the Shanghai lockdown. The slowdown in Q4 was particularly reflected in the decelerating consumption…
Bankinter| Holiday Season sales (1 November to 31 December) increase +5.3% vs +13.5% in 2021 according to the National Retail Federation. The figure falls short of the latter’s forecast of +6%/+8%. They amount to 936,300 M$ vs 942,600/960,400 M$ expected. According to the Association, part of the purchases were brought forward to October to take advantage of the promotions that were launched across the board that month to reduce inventories….
Crédito y Caución (Atradius) | In India, GDP growth slowed to 7.0% in 2022, down from 8.3% in 2021. In 2023, GDP growth is likely to slow even further to 4.4%, owing to a rapidly weakening global backdrop and slackening domestic demand. There is widespread weakness in the manufacturing industry. Industrial production fell month-on-month on a seasonally adjusted basis in July and August. These trends, in combination with a manufacturing…
F. Rodríguez| According to the conservation organisation World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the think tank Climate & Company, the European taxonomy is one of 29 being developed around the world, 14 of them, including that of the EU, within the group of G20 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Its report last year, When finance…
Link Securities| In the latest quarterly survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal, economists indicated that, although inflation has started to decline, they still expect high interest rates to push the US economy into recession in 2023. On average, business and academic economists put the probability of a recession in the next 12 months at 61%, down slightly from 63% in the October survey. Both percentages are historically high outside…