World economy

Thomas Cook.

Thomas Cook Bankruptcy: Losses (and opportunities) for the Spanish tourism sector

Ana Fuentes | On Sunday, hours before the giant Thomas Cook announced his bankruptcy, several Spanish businessmen in the tourism sector tried to avoid the fall of the British operator with an injection of 107 million. It was not enough. The Spanish employer Exceltur estimates the losses at 200 million euros and thousands of jobs are at risk. Direct competitors such as Tui, shareholder of the Riu Group, AIG and Internet platforms, however, will benefit.

 





Jerome Powell

Jerome Powell’s Penelope tactics

J. P. Marín-Arrese | Once again, Jerome Powell played down the need for monetary easing in the press conference following the Fed’s rate cut decision. His unconvincing delivery led Mr Trump to heap scorn on his uninspiring performance. For once, his bitter recriminations were fully justified.


inventor

Most innovation originates from customers, not companies

 via The Conversation | The role of ordinary people in innovation is largely overlooked. A recent study in Germany asked managers and politicians to estimate the respective share of different sources of innovation – producer firms, universities and the users of products themselves – in nine different fields, including scientific instruments, medical apps and windsurfing equipment. They underestimated the share of user innovation by more than half.



The Fed balance sheet and repo facility cannot explain the stock market’s movement in isolation

Risks are rising, but recession in the eurozone is not expected

Johannes Müller (DWS) | Three months ago, we warned that: “The outlook for the world economy is getting cloudier. Escalating trade tensions could trigger further downgrades.” Sadly, this has now come to pass. In several export-oriented economies, notably Germany and Japan, we had to cut our growth forecasts for both 2019 and 2020. For the U.S., we have left our 2020 forecast unchanged at 2%, but now expect just 2.3% for 2019, 0.2% less than three months ago.



spanish households

Long read: Expectations behind the negative yield curves

Miguel Navascués | The slope of the interest rate curve has become negative in several countries, among them the most important. As we know, whenever this happens there is a high probability that it is anticipating a recession, in this case global. Some countries will come out of this better than others, but the recession is highly likely.