Economy Financial News

Business leaders see the housing crisis as the biggest risk to the economy, a new survey from KPMG Canada shows.

In its financial policy summary and record published today (27 March), the central bank said that as markets expect the economy to continue to recover and inflation to fall, asset prices are «stretched». The BoE said the prices of many assets, such as shares and bonds, appear to be high relative to historical norms in the context of risks to the economic outlook.  That means there is a «greater risk of a sharp fall» in asset prices, the Bank said, which could ultimately make it more costly and difficult for UK households and businesses to borrow. BoE flags challenges of evaluating ...

India should be satisfied with the current growth rate unless the external environment improves, Member of Economic Advisory Council to the PM, Sanjeev Sanyal, said on Wednesday, terming economic expansion in the range of 7 per cent perfectly good. Sanyal further said it was necessary to protect the hard-earned macroeconomic stability. «Now look, it is possible for us to hit double-digit growth, but I would actually be rather careful about it. This whole game is about compounding growth,» Sanyal said while speaking at the Times Now Summit. India's economy grew at better-than-expected 8.4 per cent in the final three months of 2023, logging the fastest pace in the past one-and-a-half years.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday let stand a lower court ruling that declared some delivery drivers for Amazon were employees as the state argued

Mint's monthly EM tracker, buoyed by robust domestic growth and a sharp rebound in exports. The rupee's performance against the US dollar, while modest, outshone that of its peers, as did the achievements of the domestic stock market, enhancing India’s overall score. This solid standing, especially at a time when recession bells are ringing in Europe, is particularly advantageous for the Narendra Modi government as it approaches the Lok Sabha elections.

IPO Review: 25 companies hit Dalal Street in March with two more set to list The large-cap space has also performed well in FY24, with a handful of stocks delivering multibagger returns. The benchmark index, Nifty 50, which represents the country’s top 50 blue-chip companies across various sectors, has soared 30% in FY24 so far. It ended 9 out of the last 11 months in the green.

THE VIDEO footage of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was shocking. At around 1.30am on March 26th, when a container ship rammed into it, the central section of the 1.6-mile (2.6km) structure collapsed into the Patapsco river below, sending people and vehicles into the water. Workers repairing potholes were on the bridge at the time.

capital formation in the economy, accompanied by various government measures, will generate more job opportunities in this decade than the previous one, chief economic advisor (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran said on Tuesday. Speaking at an event, he said the decline in fixed investment and the moderation in credit expansion, which had hurt economic growth prospects in the previous decade, were hopefully «a thing of the past». «Non-food credit growth is now running close to 20%, balance sheets of companies and banks are in good shape and hiring (is improving),» Nageswaran said. Citing the 2021-22 data he said jobs in the farm sector had declined about 1.5 million but manufacturing and services added 3.7 million each and the construction sector created 1.9 million jobs.

petroleum and natural gas ministry is drawing up plans to offer free piped natural gas (PNG) connections and consumption subsidies to poor households to help its wider adoption on the lines of the Ujjwala scheme, which popularised liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) among the poor, said people familiar with the matter. The plan is likely to be part of the ministry's proposal for the first 100-day agenda of the government which will be sworn in after the general election, they said. The Modi government has asked all ministries to propose new ideas and plans that could be launched or implemented in the first 100 days of the next regime. Officials are busy preparing the plans, which are likely to be discussed with the cabinet secretary in early May in the middle of the election, according to people in the know.

Recently, a working paper titled ‘Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj,’ by Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi was released. Sections of the Indian media lapped it up, forgetting that it is not a peer-reviewed paper; nor has it been published by any reputed journal. We present arguments here in the hope that it will leave readers better informed on inequality in India.

There’s a comforting but erroneous explanation for why solar panels, home batteries and electric vehicles (EVs) are increasingly likely to be made in China. With an economy awash in easy money, its renewable manufacturers are undercutting rivals across the world; ergo, China’s comparative advantage isn’t scale, cost efficiency or innovative prowess, but cheap government subsidies. In the EV industry “everybody has an endless supply of loans and support from the local government," the Financial Times quoted Jörg Wuttke, former president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, as saying in a recent article.

In 2022, I wrote a column asking why Canada couldn’t be as smart and successful as Australia. Two years later, by almost any metric, Australia continues to outperform us economically, while maintaining its social democracy and generous welfare programs.

Canada must tackle weak productivity to inoculate the economy against factors that will drive future inflation, such as the pullback from globalization, said Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada.

Mumbai has displaced Beijing as Asia's city with the largest number of billionaires, according to Hurun Global Rich List 2024. This ticker-tape news comes as Indian stock markets powered ahead on a robust post-Covid recovery, while China is struggling to raise economic growth. The reordering is unlikely to be permanent, because India's market capitalisation-to-GDP ratio is in overvalued territory, while it is undervalued in China.

The Bank of Canada is warning that waning productivity growth in the country is an “emergency” that can force higher interest rates and limit rising wages for Canadians.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is in advanced talks to buy a 22.5-acre land parcel in Navi Mumbai’s Juinagar for building its first-ever captive data centre in India, said people with direct knowledge of the development. California-headquartered Google is currently doing due diligence for the leasehold land parcel owned by the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC). Lease rights of the plot that were originally allotted to Herdillia Chemicals are currently with Pune-based Gramercy Trade Industries. The potential deal is estimated at around Rs 850 crore given current property rates in the vicinity and MIDC’s transfer charges, said the people cited above.

The world’s governments have agreed they want to triple renewable energy by 2030, a goal laid out at the U.N. climate summit in December

U.S. consumer confidence held steady this month even as Americans are still concerned about high prices and feeling less optimistic about the short-term future

Hiring woes may be easing for small businesses

Stocks are ticking higher and are near their record levels