The Federal Reserve warned this week that financial markets remained under heavy pressure as it announced that it was holding American interest rates.
The Bush administration was recently forced to apologise to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi after a compromising White House press statement about him.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says talks to end seven years of tortuous global trade negotiations were ”at a minute to midnight”.
The response of the big developing countries showed, however, that the verbal gymnastics were not entirely convincing.
There are plenty of explanations for what’s happening in the global oil markets. It’s caused by the economic boom in the world’s largest developing countries, particularly China and India. It’s caused by the unwillingness of the oil cartel Opec to pump more crude.
Against the backdrop of the gloomiest outlook for the global economy in many years, the price of oil hit a barrel for the first time last week and the cost of wheat, rice and soya beans soared. The first rule of economics — that prices are determined by demand and supply — appears to have broken down.
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/ 25 February 2008
Fears that China might export inflation to the rest of the world were heightened this week when Beijing announced the sharpest rise in the cost of living in 11 years. With food prices rising rapidly following severe new year storms, the annual inflation rate in the fast-growing developing economy reached 7,1% last month.
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/ 6 February 2008
The International Monetary Fund this week cut its forecast for global growth this year as it warned of a possible chain reaction from the six-month-old credit crunch rippling through the global economy. Predicting the weakest expansion since 2003, the IMF said tougher lending standards imposed as a result of the sub-prime meltdown in the United States threatened to curb consumer spending in the West.
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/ 11 January 2008
President George W Bush sought recently to boost confidence in the flagging United States economy after a virtual stalling of the country’s job-creation machine triggered fresh fears that the world’s biggest economy is on course for recession in 2008.
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/ 18 December 2007
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, set at the turn of the century, made up the most aspirational development programme ever devised. But a progress report published recently by Unicef says that even though more babies are surviving, more children are in school and fewer families live in poverty, urgent action is needed if the goals are to be met by the target date of 2015.