The S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell on Tuesday as a jump in oil prices deepened worries about persistent price pressures ahead of crucial inflation readings this week, while Oracle slumped on downbeat forecast and results. Oil prices jumped more than 1% on Tuesday, building on a recent rally and stoking worries over sticky inflation in […]
The recent sustained high levels of inflation have increased focus on firm markups and profits. Some broad measures suggest increasing profits, but conflate market and non-market sector dynamics and omit important corporate costs. This column constructs an alternative measure of corporate profits to capture UK firm earnings in excess of all production costs. This measure […]
Walt Disney and Charter Communications said on Monday they have reached a deal that will see the media giant’s programming including ESPN return to the Spectrum cable service just hours ahead of the start of NFL “Monday Night Football.” News of the potential deal eased some fears that the traditional cable TV bundle, long a profit-engine for […]
Villagers wept for their lost relatives in the rubble of their homes on Monday as the death toll from Morocco’s deadliest earthquake in more than six decades rose to almost 2,700 and rescuers raced against time to find survivors. Search teams from Spain, Britain and Qatar were joining Moroccan rescue efforts after a 6.8 magnitude […]
Global inflation has once again taken centre stage for households and policymakers, stressing peoples’ finances, undermining their savings patterns, and threatening long-term financial security. This column examines how much financial literacy, including knowledge of inflation, drives people’s financial decision-making. Simple measures which have been used around the world confirm strikingly low levels of financial literacy, […]
The Covid-19 pandemic transformed consumer behaviour. This column describes how the METI Big Data Project, initiated prior to the pandemic, became a vital tool for tracking daily sales trends and consumption behaviour in Japan. Data from about 6,000 stores reveal stark shifts in products’ popularity, such as a surge in demand for masks and a […]
With less than 13 percent of its rural households connected to fixed internet, Colombia faces significant challenges to massify internet access . The starting point is a picture repeated in several countries in the region: limited internet coverage in rural areas, with only 28.8 percent of the rural population connected, and low penetration in urban segments with […]
Global trade and investment are increasingly affected by unilateral policies motivated by both economic and non-economic objectives such as safeguarding national and economic security, combatting climate change, and promoting social values. This column introduces a new book that summarises extant multilateral disciplines on use of trade policies motivated by non-economic objectives, documents the rising use […]
While many studies have been devoted to the impact of fiscal dominance on inflation, much less attention has been dedicated to its impact on exchange rates. This column focuses on an early and unique experiment of freely floating state-issued money, conducted in Venice from 1619 to 1666. It shows that the monetisation of fiscal deficits […]
Indonesia has asked the United States to begin talks on a trade deal for critical minerals so that exports from the Southeast Asian country can be covered under the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, an Indonesian ministry said on Thursday. The request was made when Indonesian President Joko Widodo met with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris […]
