A quick preview of the key economic events for the upcoming week: A busy week of meetings and announcements, the United States’ Federal Open Market Commission meeting on Wednesday looks set to be the most important event of the week. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is expected to speak, in conjunction with the release of US Q1 GDP figures, on the central bank’s monetary policy and the state of the world’s largest economy.
Monday, April 23
Egypt’s state-run gas company has terminated a controversial 2005 gas deal with Israel, citing dispute over payment. Israel, which imports over 40 percent of its natural gas supplies from Egypt, warned that the abrupt termination jeopardizes a peace agreement between the two nations.
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
The Netherlands could be the latest eurozone member forced into an early election later this year, said the BBC on Saturday, after the nation’s political parties failed to agree on a fiscal austerity package that would have brought their budget deficit in line with the EU target of under 3 percent of its GDP.
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.
Spanish universities could raise their tuition fees by as much as 50 percent this year, claimed a report by El Mundo on Thursday, after the nation’s education minister Jose Ignacio Wert raised the proposal during a meeting with university representatives.
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.
HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank by market value, has become the first bank to issue a yuan-denominated bond outside a sovereign Chinese territory. Hoping to raise at least 2 billion yuan through the three-year ‘dim sum bond’, HSBC said the benchmark move will hasten the yuan’s internationalisation.
Calling the ‘internationalisation of the yuan simply too important to ignore’, the bank said the bond issuance was part of a broader strategy to boost London’s position as a major international renminbi hub.
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.
