Pandemic Financial News

The Cuban government says it will have to either increase prices for fuel and electricity, or reduce rations for basic supplies

Amit Shah on Sunday heaped praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' campaign, saying it was singularly instrumental in lifting 60 crore people out of poverty. Waxing eloquent on the Centre's flagship campaign, which is aimed at taking the country towards self-reliance, Shah said the focus of the initiative is to make trade, industry and businesses and the 140 crore people of India 'Atmanirbhar'. "PM Modi has outlined his vision of an 'Atmanirbhar Bharat'. It is a visionary idea and campaign.

Bengaluru dominated office space absorption, but Chennai surprised everyone with over 2x growth and a record 10.5 million sq ft uptake, landing it in the top 3 for the first time, according to a report by Colliers India. Additionally, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad registered the best performance since the COVID-19 pandemic. "Indian commercial real estate and office markets will continue to witness steady interest from domestic as well as foreign-origin occupiers.

Fitch Ratings expects that India's resilient economic growth will boost demand of the corporates. In its latest research report on 'India Corporates: Sector Trends 2024', Fitch said that this is a sequel to the robust performance of the corporates in 2023 and will offset weakness from slowing growth in the key overseas markets.

Federal Reserve received some holiday cheer as inflation continued to soften while consumer demand firmed, and the Bank of Japan stuck with the world’s last negative interest rate. Meantime, maritime attacks carried out by Houthi rebels in Yemen have disrupted shipping in the Red Sea, prompting a rerouting of cargoes that’s raised costs. Here are some of the charts that appeared on Bloomberg this week on the latest developments in the global economy: World The recent spate of attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on vessels transiting the major shipping route has resulted in several large shipping companies avoiding the waterway. The decision by the world’s five largest container liners — with 65% of global capacity — to suspend transits through it means higher shipping costs and longer delivery timelines.

general elections and further reduction in inflation will help revive consumer demand across categories from grocery to apparel to electronics from March-April onwards, with rural markets and mass-segment products already showing signs of recovery, chief executives of several leading companies said. Consumer goods companies were earlier expecting demand to recover in the December quarter. While that hasn't materialised, chief executives said slowdown in consumption has come to a halt and that sales of mass-segment products are picking up after a gap of over three years. «While green shoots of recovery are visible in rural India, the demand growth is still trailing urban markets,» Dabur India chief executive Mohit Malhotra said.

New Delhi: States with relatively high revenue deficits such as Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh must take a leaf out of their healthy counterparts' book, Krishnamurthy V Subramanian has told ET, adding that the fiscal position in those states is a matter of concern even as the overall situation seems to have improved from the peak of the pandemic. Likening their fiscal situation to «aamdani atthanni kharcha rupaiya» (spend twice than you earn), Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said «there is no option for these states but to implement some necessary, though not popular, decisions to tighten their fiscal belts by reducing unproductive expenditures.» The fiscal situation of these states is like a leaky boat that can have only one outcome — «sink», he added. «These states should look to learn from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, which together accounted for more than 40% of the combined capital outlay undertaken by all states during the last five years,» Subramanian said in an interview over phone and email from Washington. «The states can also look to emulate Gujarat's Atmanirbhar Gujarat Policy for assistance to mega industries in sectors such as green energy ecosystem, mobility, capital equipment, metal and minerals, and gems and jewellery,» he added. Subramanian, who had earlier served as India's Chief Economic Advisor, further said the states with large revenue deficits will find it tough to get out of debt as these are also the states where the growth rate of state GDP is not so high. Conceptually, a revenue deficit implies that the revenue receipts of a state are not sufficient to meet its revenue expenditure,

turns the Israel-Palestine war into a global economic problem. For weeks, ships transiting the strait, a choke point in the Suez Canal, have been under attack from the Houthis, a group of highly trained, Yemen-based, Iran-backed militants with access to an array of sophisticated naval artillery. The attacks are part of the group’s offensive against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. At least 10 of the world’s biggest shippers and one oil supermajor have decided to avoid the canal, a passageway for more than 20,000 ships a year, which account for 12% of global trade, 9% of oil demand, 6% of LNG imports and 30% of container shipments.

By Emma Rumney and Arriana McLymore

Throttling back on oil production hasn’t helped OPEC and its allies to push up crude prices lately. At least four times in the past 15 months, members of the alliance known as OPEC+ have slashed oil output, only for prices to soon retreat anyway. A surge near $100 a barrel petered out earlier this year, and crude futures tumbled 10% in the two weeks after the coalition announced a roughly 5% reduction on Nov.

Amitabh Kant committee. This move aims to bring relief to countless homebuyers who have been awaiting possession of their homes, some for over a decade. Below are five key points for homebuyers.

why one is doing much better than the other. This is not a story of a startup, but a well-established and highly regulated insurance company that started rejecting claims of its customers on flimsy grounds. Star Health is a top health insurance provider in India.

The National Park Service is offering free admission to U.S. national parks on six days in 2024.

LONDON, — For some a natural diamond, created over billions of years, is the ultimate luxury, but an award-winning British designer sees greater worth in jewellery crafted using laboratory-grown gems and metal from recycled cans. Anabela Chan said she chose her materials after witnessing what she said were poor working conditions in diamond mines. «These are some of the most precious and valuable commodities in the world, that just didn't make any sense to me,» she said, in her Knightsbridge boutique in central London. Instead, her designs rely on lab-grown diamonds, recycled aluminium from cans and pearls grown using regenerative farming techniques. Chan's company does not give sales figures but said it had seen strong demand since the COVID-19 pandemic. She won the «Game Changer» category at the British Luxury Awards in November. According to Edahn Golan Diamond Research & Data, the lab-grown jewellery market has seen annual growth of 20% in recent years, driving global profits to $15 billion. As more producers enter the market, selling prices for lab-grown diamonds have fallen, and brands are looking to differentiate themselves, particularly through the jewellery design. At major retailer of lab-grown diamonds Pandora, head of diamonds Joshua Braman said lab-grown gems could create extra scope for jewellery design. Another point of difference can be sustainability. Chan relies on suppliers who use technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere in order to make diamonds, «so effectively taking something negative and turning it into something positive,» Chan said.

Taylor Morrison CEO Sheryl Palmer discusses the headwinds facing the housing market after a drop in August on existing home sales on 'The Claman Countdown.'

It is one of the first statistics you will encounter in an economics class. Gross domestic product per capita, the size of the economy divided by population, is the go-to data point for comparing living standards and prosperity across countries and over time. Yet as the world ages, GDP per capita is becoming less useful.

COVID LIVE UPDATES A report by Moneycontrol mentioned that the Serum Institute of India (SII) currently offers a vaccine against the XBB1 variant of Covid-19, which is "similar" to the JN.1 variant. The spokesperson told the business website that SII would share the documents with the public once they are submitted to the regulators. Mint could not officially verify the report.

A sub-variant of the all-too-familiar Omicron, dubbed JN.1, is the villain this time around. India has experience combating mass covid infections, unlike when the pandemic hit us in 2020. Hospitals are better equipped with oxygen, ventilators and medical staff who know what to do in the face of a covid surge.

COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says amid controversy surrounding government rapid test purchases.Trudeau faced questions stemming from a Global News investigation that found a rapid test importer landed an estimated $2 billion in federal contracts in 2021 and 2022, despite giving regulators incomplete data about its product’s accuracy.“During the pandemic, we were doing everything we could in unprecedented ways to get as many different ways of keeping Canadians safe as we possibly could, whether it was on rapid tests, whether it was on procurement of PPE, whether it was on contracts for vaccines, and getting the vaccines needed to make sure that Canadians got through this pandemic,” Trudeau told reporters in Toronto on Thursday.“There’s no doubt (there’s) lots of lessons to learn about things that worked really well, about things that we probably won’t be doing again in the next pandemic when it comes. But every step of the way through the pandemic, it was all hands-on deck with every different way we could do to try and make sure we were saving as many lives as possible, and getting our economy back on its feet as quickly as possible.”A year-long investigation into federal procurement revealed that BTNX, a small rapid test supplier based outside Toronto, deleted dozens of specimens, or samples, from a study it submitted to Health Canada.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) has raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of India's debts. It cautioned that general government debt is likely to exceed 100 percent of India's gross domestic product (GDP) in the near future, Business Standard reported.

There are about 1.2 million men and 600,000 women working in the 8,785 information technology and biotechnology companies, according to the official data.