With the World Cup only weeks away, one of Wall Street’s leading financial houses recently switched its attention from gold, shares and the dollar to which emerging economy has the best chance of lifting the trophy in Berlin on July 9. The Goldman Sachs World Cup and Economics 2006 survey suggests there is a limit to how much overlap there is between the beautiful game and the murky world of finance.
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen millions of French people — students, trade unionists and pretty much any other group you care to mention — protesting on the streets against a small change in labour laws. The protests were bigger, though less violent, than last year’s riots in many of France’s poor suburbs, home to many of its immigrants.
The global economy surprised most people yet again last year and grew nearly as fast as 2004’s 30-year high of 5%, in spite of surging oil prices and a sharp tightening of monetary policy in the United States, which is still the world’s biggest economy by far. But some of the initial worries and problems will exist throughout 2006; they have not gone away.
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/ 7 November 2005
There has been a strange sense of anti-climax to the changing of the guard at the United States Federal Reserve, announced out of the blue recently. There was none of the worldwide outpouring of grief, for example, that accompanied the death of Pope John Paul II earlier this year. The end of Alan Greenspan’s reign is as key a moment for the world’s financial markets and economy as a change of pope is for the Catholic Church.
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/ 31 October 2005
Long seen as one of the two or three favourites to replace Alan Greenspan at the helm of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke is the chairperson of President George W Bush’s council of economic advisers. He is a highly respected monetary economist and had a high profile when working as one of the federal governors.
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/ 31 October 2005
Confidence among American consumers unexpectedly fell this month to a two-year low as high petrol prices and a severe hurricane season took their toll on sentiment in the world’s largest economy. The United States-based Conference Board research body reported that its confidence index fell to 85 from an upwardly revised 87,5 in September.
Recently, the World Trade Organisation kicked off yet another attempt to put back on track stalled talks that aim to reform the rules governing world trade in everything from sugar through manufactured goods to services such as insurance. WTO chief Supachai Panitchpakdi recently said he was pressing the panic button because the talks were in danger of failing.
The new French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, has declared he will start to tackle France’s unemployment problem within his first 100 days in office. Joblessness, he told his compatriots, is the ”true French disease”. That is self-evident, but De Villepin’s frankness shows that the recognition of the problem is becoming more and more widespread
It was a question of when not if for oil traders on Tuesday as the price of a barrel of crude threatened to burst through the -a-barrel barrier for the first time. News that the North Sea Forties oil field had been shut because of technical problems pushed an already jittery market, which has jumped 11% in the past week alone, to a new record high of ,55 for US light crude.
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/ 25 January 2005
Research estimates that the United States and United Kingdom could send five million jobs offshore during the next decade, provoking vociferous complaints from trades unions. The US and UK tend to be the biggest offshorers because of the global dominance of the English language, although Germany is rapidly increasing its use of offshoring.