Economists love their indicators and indexes – from the more commonly known, such as the Big Mac Index, to the highly-lauded but hardly tested Skyscraper index, to the downright bizzare such as the
With the Olympic Games less than a 100 days away, businesses and advertisers are placing high hopes on social media to create a buzz for their brands. London, the 2012 host city, is hoping to channel some of the Olympics energy into economic growth, yet on the other hand, Greek athletes risk missing the Games due to cuts in state funding. Given the global economic circumstances, how will this year’s Olympics be different?
As its population continues to shrink and age, Japan, the third largest world economy, could lose its developed nation status and global significance by 2050, said the Tokyo-based 21st Century Public Policy Institute.
According to the think-tank, which is linked to Japan’s powerful Keidanren business federation, Japan’s shrinking workforce, caused by a chronic low birth-rate, combined with lower savings and investment rates could see the country lose its cherished ‘developed nation’ status by mid-century.
As China’s economy heads for a slow down, the Chinese central bank has promised to boost the supply of liquidity in the financial system by turning to monetary easing tools. The announcement comes after China’s weaker-than-expected Q1 GDP growth, with a central bank official saying the extent and timing will be ‘appropriate’.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, an unnamed central bank official said China is looking to ‘steadily’ increase liquidity to steer its economy towards a soft landing.
The value of Ghana’s cedi will decline by another 9.2 percent in 2012 following record depreciation last year, said a report by Bloomberg on Wednesday, which will make the cedi the worst-performing African currency over the last two years.
A contemporary art museum in Naples, Italy, has begun to burn its collection of art pieces in a public protest against harsh government budget cuts, which have left many of the nation’s cultural institutions on the verge of closing down.
”Our 1000 artworks are headed for destruction anyway because of the indifference of the government,” said the museum’s director Antonio Manfredi, who wrote a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year in an attempt to move his entire collection to her nation.
The honeymoon for the ECB’s new president Mario Draghi has turned out to be brief. The trouble is that the eurozone has an austerity strategy, but no growth strategy – and, without that, all it really has is a recession strategy that makes austerity self-defeating, because, if output continues to contract, deficit and debt ratios will continue to rise to unsustainable levels.
Japan will provide $60 billion in loans to the IMF in order to boost the fund’s financial firepower against the eurozone debt crisis, announced Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi, who also pledged to coordinate an international effort with other finance ministers ahead of a crucial G-20 meeting in Washington later this week.
Libertarian paternalism, or “soft paternalism”, is a political philosophy which states that government can nudge citizens into making decisions that are good for themselves, while offering complete freedom to individuals to make up their own minds. The problem is that the semblance of choice is an illusion, because individuals do not consciously think through their decision.
China has increased its US debt holdings for the second month in a row as the country looks for new ways to spend its rising foreign currency reserves. China, the largest foreign buyer of US government debt, also has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world.
A large part of Beijing’s foreign exchange reserves are invested in US government bonds, and the latest data from the US Treasury department shows that China purchased an additional $12.7 billion of US Treasuries in February.
