The economy as a whole: growth, inflation, jobs and interest rates, and the central banks and treasuries that steer them.
52 articles
Britain's industrial strategy promises to bring factories back, and the investment commitments are real. But a modern plant employs a fraction of the workers an old one did, and the political case for manufacturing still rests on job numbers the technology no longer produces.
Nigeria's currency, reserves and growth are stronger than they have been in years, but poverty and inflation numbers show the recovery has not yet reached most households.
Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan's life sentence has renewed scrutiny of a property crash that has dragged down growth, confidence and consumer spending across the world's second-largest economy.
The yen's collapse to ¥164 forced the largest coordinated US-Japan currency intervention since 1998, not out of allyship, but because Japan's $1.2 trillion in US Treasury holdings meant a disorderly slide threatened to spike American borrowing costs.
Germany has abandoned the borrowing rules that defined it, and the euro zone is heading for record bond supply just as the ECB stops buying and starts tightening. Yields are climbing accordingly. The question is no longer whether Europe can borrow, but whether what it buys with the money is worth what the money now costs.
A divided Fed, a still-roaring AI rally and an Iran framework that collapsed within a fortnight pulled markets in three directions across August. The whiplash between them is a live lesson in how risk gets priced.
We have never produced so much clean energy, and renewables have never been so cheap or so popular, yet we are no closer to net-zero. This irony boils down to two words, supply and demand – and most of the narrative around renewable energy is centred on the wrong one.
Payroll shocks and tame inflation managed to undo a month of Fed hawkishness. The economy just got worse, but Wall Street just got happier.
Why the bond market may have become America’s biggest macroeconomic problem
Paper-market distortion; central bank hoarding; mercurial retail frenzies; and shifting macroeconomic tides. The modern gold market is driven by a tangle of contradictory forces meaning that making sense of this historic safe haven requires looking past the spot price to unravel the forces actually moving the metal.
Drought on the Danube has forced nuclear plants in Hungary and Romania to cut output. Chernobyl and Fukushima show why the economic damage from a disaster travels far beyond the site, through budgets, supply chains and expectations, and why it lasts.
For decades China was constrained by what it could produce. It is now constrained by what its households will buy, and the surplus it exports instead is reshaping trade policy across the world.
Three of nine voted to raise Bank Rate. The Bank's own Report then said the market curve is steeper than policy needs to be, and that most of its slope is not a rate expectation.
Repeated heatwaves are no longer a seasonal inconvenience for Europe's economies. From lost labour productivity to rising food prices and multi-billion-euro damage bills, extreme heat is emerging as a structural drag on growth across the continent.
Algorithmic feeds have quietly become a dominant force in setting asset prices and mobilising political movements, from GameStop to India's Cockroach Janata Party, while regulators still lack the tools to measure how virality converts into capital and power.
AI capital expenditure has emerged as the last major engine of global demand, propping up growth even as trade wars fragment the world economy. Whether that engine can keep pace with its scale and financing is the open question.
Machine learning can spot economic shifts weeks before official statistics catch up, but its black-box reasoning means the most reliable forecasts still come from economists working alongside AI, not being replaced by it.
New Fed chair Kevin Warsh was expected to bring a dovish, rate-cutting sensibility to the central bank. Instead, his first meeting delivered the most hawkish surprise markets have seen in years, with traders now pricing in the Fed's first hike since 2023.
Argentina's disinflation looks like a policy triumph on paper, but the currency framework enabling it may be quietly rebuilding the fragility it was designed to end.
China's factories are shipping more than they have in years, driven by an AI-fuelled tech boom. Yet second-quarter growth still slowed to 4.3%, its weakest in decades outside the pandemic, a reminder that strong exports don't always mean a strong economy.