Tastes are changing. It used to be that when you were hungry, you either had to go the supermarket or, if you were feeling lazy, a local restaurant to order takeout. Now, in the UK, a delivery company that doesn’t produce, cook, or even sell food is worth more than most of the country’s major supermarkets.
In Sweden, a combination of low interest rates and rapidly rising house prices has been making the central bank nervous for years. House prices have increased by an average of 9% per year for the past three years, pushing up household indebtedness in lockstep.
Norway is miles ahead of the rest of the world in its adoption of electric cars, thanks to a series of generous government subsidies. But policymakers have often worried that the subsidies are too good amid criticism that they simply allow rich households to buy expensive electric cars on the cheap.
This story is part of our guide to five gift-giving philosophies to help you find the perfect gift.
The UK won’t leave the European Union until March 2019. For economists, forecasting what will happen between now and then, and especially beyond, is practically impossible.
In the UK, productivity growth has been almost non-existent for the past decade. But this didn’t stop the government from persistently forecasting that this would correct itself in the near future.
It’s a battle that neither side is destined to win. Last week, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan picked another fight with the country’s central bank, spooking investors already worried about the institution’s independence. Erdogan said on Nov. 17 that the bank’s officials were on the “wrong path” by raising interest rates to battle inflation.
People are going crazy for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin just set another record above $8,000, shaking off a 25% drop earlier this month. But if the wild ride of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is too risky for you, a new payments startup thinks it has just the thing. Something stable, comforting, as old as money itself: gold.
Apple just got its first head of diversity and inclusion in May. But already, Denise Young Smith, one of the most powerful and senior black executives in tech, is planning to leave the company at the end of the year, according to TechCrunch.
Norway, Western Europe’s largest producer of oil, has decided it doesn’t want to be so beholden to the fortunes of the oil industry anymore. Norway’s central bank recommended today that the nation’s giant sovereign wealth fund should dump its holdings of oil and gas stocks, which make up about 6% of the fund’s benchmark equity index, worth a whopping $37 billion in assets.
The European economy has experienced an impressive turnaround in recent years. From a position so weak that some countries needed international bailouts and central banks launched unprecedented monetary stimulus to stave off broader turmoil, the region is now considered the “engine of global trade” and economic growth by the IMF.
Gold isn’t so shiny anymore. Globally, demand for the precious metal has fallen to its lowest level since late 2009, according to the World Gold Council. In the third quarter of 2017, demand for the haven asset was 915 metric tons, 9% lower than a year earlier.
The US economy seems back on track after a brutal set of hurricanes—employers added 261,000 jobs in October and the unemployment rate edged down to 4.1%.
For more than a decade, the UK economy was deemed too weak to withstand an increase in interest rates. Today, for the first time since July 2007, the Bank of England hiked its benchmark rate (pdf) up from an all-time low. (The bank was founded in the late 1600s, so that covers a long time.)
Big cities all over the world are grappling with the same problem: how to make homes more affordable for the people who live there. Part of the problem is that the rich see buying overseas real estate as a way of safely storing their wealth, raising the prices beyond what many residents can afford and locking young people out of the housing market. Cities in Canada tried imposing a steep tax on foreign buyers, with limited success. New Zealand, where prices have also soared in recent decades, is taking a different approach and plans to ban foreigners from buying existing homes.
From boastful presidential tweets to breathless newspaper headlines, it’s hard to avoid hearing about the US stock market’s really good year. How good? The market value of the S&P 500 has gained about $3 trillion since the end of 2016. That amounts to a total return of 17% for investors, the best year since 2013.
Almost a month after Catalans voted for independence from the rest of Spain, in a referendum Madrid considered illegal, a new battle has begun. After the region’s leaders dithered about their true intentions, Catalonia’s regional parliament voted this afternoon to formally declare independence from Spain. As people cheered in the streets, Madrid’s response was swift. The Spanish Senate gave prime minister Mariano Rajoy the power to impose direct rule over the region. Under Article 155 of Spain’s constitution, Rajoy and the central government can take control over the region’s administration, remove its leaders, and call for new elections.
Last month, Norway’s giant sovereign wealth fund announced that it had surpassed a big milestone: its assets reached $1 trillion. To get there, it enjoyed a 11-month-long streak of positive returns, its longest uninterrupted winning run since mid-2013.
At the end of last year, there were 1,542 billionaires around the world sitting on a $6 trillion trove of wealth, according to a new report by UBS and PwC. The good news, for them, is that this was up from $5.1 trillion the year before.
Catalonia’s push for independence from Spain is getting messier by the day.
Germany has long been the engine that drives the EU’s economic growth, but for the past few years it has been outpaced by countries further east—most notably Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic.
Precisely 30 years ago today, on Oct. 19, 1987, stock markets around the world suffered one of their worst days ever, in what became known as Black Monday. After a long-running rally, the crash began in Asia, picked up steam in London and ultimately ended with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down a whopping 22.6% for the day in New York. This was—and still remains—the worst day in the Dow’s history, in percentage terms.
Forget gold and platinum, because the shiny metal catching the eye of traders is palladium. The price of palladium surpassed $1,000 per troy ounce for the first time in 16 years in trading today.
The Japanese stock market is having an excellent run. Last week, the Nikkei 225 climbed to its highest level since November 1996. On Monday, the gains kept on coming and the benchmark index closed up another 0.5%.
