BEFORE SETTING the budget each year, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer is given a revised set of fiscal forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the official fiscal watchdog. In recent years the chancellor has looked through his fingers as he turned the pages: time and again since the financial crisis of 2008, Britain’s…
THE LOS ANGELES regional food bank distributes 300,000 meals a month, but that, says its director, Michael Flood, is only a fraction of what the hungry 1.4m people in the county need. The bank resembles the vast warehouse operation of a supermarket chain, with apartment-sized refrigerators and fork-lift trucks processing millions of pounds of groceries.…
Paulo Whitaker/Reuters US equity markets were under pressure Thursday as the 10-year yield touched its highest level since the spring of 2011. Selling weighed heaviest on the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which saw losses in excess of 2%. Super Micro Computers crashed more than 50% after it was reported that Chinese spies implanted tiny chips in server motherboards…
“Automakers urge the U.S. and Mexico to quickly re-engage with Canada to continue to build on this progress,” the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, which represents most carmakers that sell vehicles in the United States, said in a statement. “The industry is hopeful that any changes to Nafta auto rules of origin continue to strike the…
IBM will pay $190 per share for the software company, which it described as the world's leading provider of open source cloud software, a more than 60% premium to Red Hat's closing stock price of $116.68 on Friday. Shares traded upwards of $175 in June, but disappointing earnings combined with a volatile market had seen…
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The opposition blames President Macri's centre-right policies for the recession Argentina's government has unexpectedly asked for the early release of a $50bn (£37.2bn) loan from the IMF amid a growing economic crisis.President Mauricio Macri said the move was designed to restore confidence in the Argentine economy. The Argentine peso has…
OF THE various things Britain’s government has got wrong in its Brexit negotiating strategy, perhaps the most enduring is the belief that it could drive a wedge into the ranks of the remaining 27 members of the European Union. A favourite early mantra of Brexiteer MPs was that German carmakers would pressure Angela Merkel to…
WASHINGTON — Canada’s foreign minister cut short a trip to Europe and rushed to Washington on Tuesday as President Trump’s top trade advisers reiterated that the United States is prepared to leave Canada out of a revised North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico. Touting the agreement with Mexico as a major win, Trump administration…
Image copyright AFP Image caption Relations between US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have occasionally been fraught The US and Canada have reached a new trade deal, along with Mexico, to replace the current North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) gives the US greater access to Canada's…
WASHINGTON — The United States and Canada reached a last-minute deal to salvage the North American Free Trade Agreement on Sunday, overcoming deep divisions to keep the 25-year-old trilateral pact intact. The deal came after a weekend of frantic talks to try and preserve a trade agreement that has stitched together the economies of Mexico,…
