Pandemic Financial News

China is in the midst of a breakneck expansion of its copper industry that’s reshaping global flows of the essential metal for the world’s energy transition. The smelter build-up will be a key talking point for hundreds of copper-industry executives descending this week on China’s commodity hub of Shanghai for Asia Copper Week. Miners and smelters will negotiate key annual ore-supply contracts, and attendees will take the latest temperature of Chinese demand. Despite the financial toll of the pandemic and China’s property crisis, the nation’s metals consumption has been relatively strong in 2023.

I have been in Delhi for a little over a week, and, as is the case at this time of the year, the city is highly polluted. The trouble is Mumbai, where I live, has also been very polluted this year. Mumbai’s problem stems from a massive increase in construction in 2023.

Inflation in the United States slowed last month in a sign that the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are continuing to cool the consumer price spikes that have bedeviled consumers for the past two years.

Wall Street analysts are dialing back on the compliments paid to Corporate America at the fastest clip in years. «Good quarter,» «congratulations» and similar plaudits are drying up on quarterly earnings calls for S&P 500 companies, setting up 2023 for the biggest such annual decline since the Great Recession. The drop is even more pronounced when compared with the pandemic era, running 35% below the average pace in the previous three years. Analysts have gone cold on corporate executives as they climb a wall of worry that includes soaring labour costs, surging prices for raw materials, rising borrowing rates and heightening geopolitical tensions that have shown no signs of abating. «Fewer companies are doing well,» said Alex Zukin, an analyst covering software companies at Wolfe Research.

Bonus season on Wall Street is looking grim for bankers in an industry hobbled by rising interest rates, bank failures and a dealmaking slump. Next year will probably be no better. 

Infrastructure Department officials are considering cancelling special allowances given to major cargo operators to fly outside the Sydney Airport curfew after Scott Morrison wrote to Labor demanding it be scrapped.

HAVANA (Reuters) — Cuba wants to tap its fast-growing overseas population for fresh investment to lift its sinking economy, a top foreign ministry official told Reuters this week, as the communist-run nation looks to overcome its worst downturn in decades.

Bank of India (RBI), available on a daily basis, shows that card spends this October at shops and on e-commerce sites was about 17% higher than in October 2022. In absolute terms, that’s a ₹29,000 crore increase. The data covers spending on credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards.

FRANKFURT—Europe’s labor markets are starting to crack. After a year of near-zero economic growth, job creation is slowing and surveys suggest that more businesses in the region are preparing to lay off workers, threatening to further damp growth and drain public coffers. Germany’s unemployment rate has climbed by 0.8 percentage point in recent months to 5.8%, the highest level since 2017 outside the pandemic period.

Wanted by Hollywood: World-famous intellectual property that no one has yet thought to make into a movie. Or nearly three dozen movies, for that matter. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the most successful movie franchise in history, grossing nearly $30 billion globally over 33 films to date.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has dismissed the prime minister and replaced him with the head of his cabinet ahead of national elections next year and at a time when economic anxieties are running high

International students attended U.S. universities in surging numbers last year, rebounding from a pandemic slump with the help of a 35% jump in students coming from India

Bayern Munich has emerged from the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic in good financial health after reporting record total revenues of 854.2 million euros ($913 million) for the 2022-23 season

Long-haul carrier Emirates says it will buy Boeing Co. aircraft in a deal worth $52 billion

The United States is hosting the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference this week for the first time since 2011

Looking back at the year the Bank of Canada started hiking interest rates, things looked pretty good.

inflation, as I suggested last week was one possibility. Neither argument captures the nuance of labor market changes this year, and how workers should be thinking about their job prospects going forward. While the odds of getting laid off remain very low, for the small — but growing — percentage of people who are either unemployed or looking to change jobs, conditions are arguably worse now than they’ve been in more than five years, outside of the pandemic.

Economist Stephen Moore discusses negative economic trends in Democrat-run cities and Moody's lowering its outlook on the U.S. credit rating.

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Transport Minister Catherine King says her decision to block Qatar Airways expanding its services into Australia’s four biggest airports was not to protect Qantas, despite earlier claims she had done so to save local aviation jobs and to assist the national carrier’s recovery from the pandemic.

By Sam Nussey and Kaori Kaneko