Pandemic Financial News

In a move that could reshape its economic landscape, Bhutan has announced the establishment of a new Special Administrative Region (SAR) in Gelephu, strategically located along its border with India. The announcement, made by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk during his National Day speech on 17 December, signals Bhutan's intent to revitalize its economy by leveraging its geographical position to bridge South and Southeast Asian markets. Mint explores what this means for Bhutan and the wider South Asian region, with a special focus on India's role in this ambitious endeavour.

credit cards low—and the credit agencies in the dark. “Afterpay doesn’t report to Equifax," Rodriguez, 31, said. “That was very appealing to me." Consumers are shifting more of their spending to so-called buy now, pay later lenders, a trend that is only accelerating as high interest rates dent budgets and pandemic savings dry up.

Rich countries are raising more money from taxpayers than they have in decades to finance a burst of state spending as surging interest rates make borrowing less attractive. Tax revenues have risen to record levels as a share of economic output in a number of major economies, including France, Japan and South Korea, according to data published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of mainly rich countries. The increases are worth hundreds of billions of dollars in additional revenue for governments that are navigating an array of new spending needs, from military priorities to industrial policy.

Udaan on Monday laid off 100 to 120 employees, about 10% of its workforce, days after raising $340 million in a funding round. Most of the job cuts happened in the go-to-market (GTM) team, which handles relationships with sellers, among other responsibilities, people in the know said. The layoffs, the sources explained, were due to redundancies following a rejig of the business in September.

Floydwiz Technologies has grabbed nearly 3% of the Indian laptop market with its Primebook brand of affordable devices in just nine months of entering the online marketplace, according to its co-founder, Chitranshu Mahant, who expects sales to touch 50,000 units by the end of 2023. The company has a revenue of Rs 10 crore per month and is projected to touch Rs 60 crore for 2023 at this run rate, Mahant told ET.

A digital real estate company has been analyzing the data across a good portion of the province and says prices and sales have dropped, with some underbidding now taking place in many areas.

WASHINGTON—Robert Gilbert is fed up with high prices for groceries and other necessities, and he has giving up hope that President Biden can help. “I don’t think he has really done much for us, nothing that benefits me really," said Gilbert, 65 years old, a retiree living on a fixed income in Fenton, Mo. He voted for Biden in 2020, but doesn’t think he will support him again.

BSE Sensex was valued 24.8 times the earnings of its 30 constituents. This average monthly price-to-earnings (PE) ratio of the Sensex has been higher than this only about 20% of the time since 1990. While it has delivered gains even at higher valuations, some of the corrections have been brutal—the Harshad Mehta securities scam in 1992, the dotcom crash in 2000, and the US financial contagion in 2008.

HONG KONG—The retail world used to cater to Chinese tourists. Luxury shops opened wherever they went, and Parisian department stores hired Mandarin speakers. Mom-and-pop stores in Hong Kong were replaced by vendors offering products Chinese tourists demanded, such as milk powder and medicines.

Christmas tree dubbed the «most humble in the world» has sold at auction for £2,600. Originally brought in 1920, the Christmas tree is 31 inches tall with 25 branches and 12 fake berries. In the beginning, the tree was gifted to Loughborough resident Dorothy Grant in the aftermath of the First World War. It served as her Christmas tree from when Dorothy Grant was eight-years-old until she died in 2014, at the age of 101. Her daughter Shirley Hall, 84, who lives near Loughborough, inherited the tree.

Germany's parliament has approved plans to raise the country’s levy on carbon dioxide emissions from fuel by more than previously planned next month

The Congressional Budget Office says it expects inflation to nearly hit the Federal Reserve’s 2% target rate in 2024, as overall growth is expected to slow and unemployment is expected to rise into 2025, according to updated economic projections for th...

Growth, innovation, enthusiasm and uncertainty were some of the key takeaways used to describe what the financial markets are likely to look like in the U.S. next year, according to executives speaking at a Bank of America roundtable on Thursday.

'Permanent Distortion' author Nomi Prins argues Fed policy is adversely affecting everyone, on 'Making Money.'

Citigroup Inc. is once again allowing most of its employees to work from anywhere for the final two weeks of the year.

help prevent the spread of COVID-19, guidance that matches with what aerosol scientists say about preventing airborne diseases.“The other thing really is that if you’re sick, don’t go,” Gregson said.Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alberta Hospital, said there were lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that can be used in a season of heightened influenza levels.“If you’re about to go into a social situation in a smaller, enclosed space with a whole bunch of people and some of them are quite elderly or have medical compromise, you might want to rethink the space and the time for that, or spread out the visits with smaller groups over a larger time, or at least pay some attention to ventilation,” she said.Like Gregson, Saxinger said someone starting to feel like they’re coming down with something should take a rain check on the visit.“If you are going to be visiting elderly people in long term care or something, because that’s when you do that, masking remains important and people often forget hand-washing actually really does help too,” she said.While the very old and the very young tend to have weaker immune systems that are more susceptible to severe outcomes from infections, Saxinger said the H1N1 family of influenza viruses is known to produce worse for younger populations.“I just checked the hospitalized flu case breakdown by age and indeed it has flipped.

Over the past decade a number of alarming stories have chronicled the decline of U.S. life expectancy in the midst of rising overdose deaths, Covid-19, alcohol-related deaths and suicides.

The starter pistol has sounded for college internship applications—for the summer of 2025. Companies in finance and accounting are now recruiting for interns nearly 18 months before college students would be expected to start. The investment bank Guggenheim Securities and the Royal Bank of Canada, in addition to accounting stalwarts Grant Thornton and PricewaterhouseCoopers among others, started advertising for 2025 summer internships this fall.

(Updated — December 15, 2023 4:26 AM EST)

Retirement balances for midcareer workers declined between 2019 and 2022, despite gains on financial assets such as stocks during that period, according to new research.

Canada’s housing market cooled further in November as sellers joined buyers on the sidelines, hoping for activity to heat back up in the spring, according to the national real estate association.