LONDON | Already in the mood to dismiss 2012 as a lost year for the UK economy? Analysts in the City of London waived as a non-event the preliminary GDP estimate of this year’s first quarter, released Wednesday by the office of national statistics, which showed that the British economy had contracted by -0.2%. The negative figure added up to a -0.3% fall in the economy in the final three months…
Many economists and the Anglo-Saxon financial gurus have been killing the euro month after month since early 2010. But, even if their doomsday predictions have miserably failed so far, their negative influence over the markets can not be neglected. By Fernando Barciela, in Madrid | PART 3 | Some banks, especially in the UK, were not far behind the panic wave and at that time announced that they had intensified their contingency plans before the more than probable failure of the euro. After…
WASHINGTON | Colin Fenton is the global head of Commodities Research and Strategy at J.P. Morgan. Fenton believes that there is margin for higher energy prices, with limited economic damage. Brent and WTI are behaving virtually like “two different commodities”, as one trader put it last week. Asia, tied to Brent oil, has relatively strong oil demand and limited supply, while the US is experiencing an energy production renaissance in the context…
LONDON | Sentiment among the UK’s small and medium-sized manufacturers fell for the third quarter running in the three months to January, as output stagnated and orders decreased against a backdrop of heightened economic and political uncertainty, the CBI said. Of the 350 respondents to the CBI’s latest quarterly SME Trends Survey published on Monday, 26% said output rose while 25% said that it fell, and the resulting balance of +1%…
Recovery problem: job rate’s pulse is weak, statistics are misleading, and the construction sector –that in 2004 created 14% of the jobs but last year didn’t reach 3%,– looks gloomy. WASHINGTON | According to provisional statistics, the US created 200,000 jobs in December and 1.64 million around 2011, being 2011 the best since 2006 in terms of job creation. The employment forecast for 2012 is 2.1 million –unemployment rate ended the…
