By Saqib Iqbal Ahmed, Saikat Chatterjee NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. dollar fell to a one-week low against a basket of currencies on Friday, after a survey showed U.S. consumer sentiment dropped sharply in early August, raising worries of a dent in economic activity. A man counts U.S. dollar banknotes at a currency exchange...Read More

Policy Center for the New South, August 2021, PB-21/29 Macroeconomic dynamics in the U.S. economy—and arguably also in other advanced economies—has increasingly become associated with asset price fluctuations in the past few decades. There has been a mismatch between rising financial wealth and the pace of creation and incorporation of new assets. Along with macroeconomic...Read More

Early in his career, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz had an extended stay in Kenya, where he was struck by various oddities in how the local economy operated. Sharecropping was one such anomaly: If farmers were required to surrender half of their harvest to landlords, Stiglitz wondered, wouldn’t that greatly tax incentives and thus reduce efficiency?...Read More

NOBLELIFT, BASED in Changxing, a town on the banks of Tai Lake, provides robotic tools for warehouse management: self-driving pallet jacks and sorting systems that make picking and fetching quicker and less dependent on humans. The factories in which it builds its wares are themselves a blur of robot arms. “There’s no comparison with the...Read More

KARACHI: The dollar increased to Rs164.01 in the interbank foreign exchange market on Thursday, as the demand for import payments remained high, dealers said. The exchange rate ended with a decline of 9 paisas in the rupee value to close at Rs164.01 from last day’s closing of Rs163.92. The dollar is at the highest level...Read More

People wait in a food bank line, New York City, May 15, 2020. “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure” is a quip attributed to Mark Twain. Case in point: the figures in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report for July. These state an unemployment rate of 5.4% plus 943,000 new jobs —...Read More

The Indian economy is heading towards an uncertain but pivotal moment. It is coming off a historically poor run with the economy having shrunk by a post-Independence record 7.3 per cent in 2020-21. This contraction was also an order of magnitude greater than the 3.3 per cent contraction of the world economy in 2020. In...Read More

In a speech from the White House, Biden touted a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed the consumer price inflation slowed during July, though it remained elevated. Stripping out more volatile food and energy items, consumer prices rose 4.3% in the 12 months ended in July, slightly below the June’s rise. Overall,...Read More

Market Roundup • German HICP (MoM)  0.5%, 0.5% forecast,0.4% previous • German Jul HICP (YoY)  3.1%,3.1% forecast, 2.1% previous • German Jul CPI (MoM) 0.9%, 0.9% forecast, 0.4% previous • German Jul CPI (YoY) 3.8%,  3.8% forecast, 2.3% previous • Italian Jul HICP (MoM) -1.0%,-1.1% forecast, 0.2% previous • Italian Jul CPI (MoM)  0.5%,0.3% forecast,...Read More

Stop pinning this rally on the Federal Reserve, Jim Cramer told his Mad Money viewers Tuesday. Sure, lower interest rates are helping the economy, but the Fed’s contribution pales in comparison to the effects the child tax credit is having on retail or what the new infrastructure bills means for American manufacturing. That’s why Cramer...Read More