September, 2016

• 27 September

  Oil drops as Iran says it won’t freeze output at current level

  

    Bloomberg Oil extended declines as Iran said it’s unwilling to freeze output at current levels and wants to raise production to 4 million barrels a day, damping expectations for OPEC to reach a deal to stabilize markets when the group meets on Wednesday in Algiers. Futures fell as much as 1.7 percent in New York. Prices rebounded 3.3 percent ...

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• 27 September

  Swiss firm to inspect Egypt wheat

  

    Reuters Egypt will hire SGS SA, a Geneva-based inspection service, to review wheat cargoes, a move that may ease trader concerns about the country’s frequently changing import standards. SGS will examine imported wheat at origin and arrival ports, Hamed Abdel-Dayem, a spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry, said by phone on Tuesday. Typically, the inspections have been carried out by ...

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• 27 September

  Why GDP is China’s most illusory indicator

  

    Among investors and economists who study China, few arguments are more contentious than growth — more specifically, how to measure it. Officially, China’s economy has been growing at an annualized rate of nearly 10 percent for the past three decades. But plenty of analysts will argue that those figures are highly optimistic. Why should this debate matter? After all, ...

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• 27 September

  Trump takes Clinton’s bait and hooks himself

  

    The entire 90-minute debate on Monday night was a demonstration that Donald Trump doesn’t have the temperament to be president. Hillary Clinton was prepared — she always is — and she baited Trump early and often. And Trump got caught each time. He also hooked himself, including in at least two exchanges with moderator Lester Holt (who did an ...

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• 27 September

  Europe’s free-trade advocates need to speak up

    It’s entirely unsurprising — expected, really — for the anti-global European left to oppose a trade deal with America. But with Canada? The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, painstakingly negotiated over seven years, would cut trade barriers between Europe and the world’s 10th-largest economy. Unlike the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the U.S. (which ...

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• 27 September

  Focus on poaching to end illegal wildlife trade

    A mega meeting to check the booming illegal wildlife trade — valued at $20 billion a year — under way in Johannesburg has got stuck in an unseemly fight. The clash comes on the heels of a report which says that the population of African elephants has declined by 111,000 in the past ten years due to surge in ...

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• 27 September

  Lula’s downfall won’t fix Brazil’s political mess

  

    From hungry migrant peasant to rock-star president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has played many roles over the years. Even so, taking the defendant’s chair in Latin America’s biggest political graft scandal will be a first. Lula has vehemently denied the charges — he’s accused of taking some $1.1 million in bribes disguised as home improvements from a contractor ...

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• 27 September

  The future of the US economy depends on Mexico

    The muscle behind the U.S. economic expansion is the same as the recovery’s weakness, and it lies in one word: Mexico. Since the low in December 2009, employment in the U.S. has increased by 13.6 million workers. Forty-three percent of that growth, or 5.9 million workers, came from Hispanics — some born in the U.S., others immigrants. Mexico is ...

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• 27 September

  The economics profession has a major blind spot

  

    The longer I work in the news media, the more I notice a problem with the way economics interacts with the world at large. Just to cite one example, economists often don’t take politics into account. As a result, econ models leave out important pieces, and the advice of economists often falls on deaf ears or is seen as ...

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• 27 September

  Loan growth in private sector pauses, says ECB

  

    AFP Credit growth to the private sector in the euro area was steady in August, European Central Bank (ECB) data showed on Tuesday, boosting expectations that the bank will refrain from adding firepower to monetary policy for now. Many of the European Central Bank’s measures aim to make access to credit easier, allowing people and businesses to invest and ...

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