Filtered by Topic: Monetary Policy Use setting Monetary Policy
The Omicron variant has supercharged the seasonal wave of virus cases sweeping parts of the US, adding to the existing headwinds to consumption growth over the coming months. (See Chart 1.) In contrast to governments in Europe, however, there are still …
21st December 2021
Inflation pressures have shown no signs of letting up across Emerging Europe, with headline inflation rates surging to multi-year highs in November. Producer price inflation has hit rates not seen in decades, food inflation continues to surge and strong …
20th December 2021
Upside inflation risks are building in India. Damage to crops from bad weather has caused spikes in vegetable prices recently. And base effects aren’t helpful: food inflation will accelerate in year-on-year terms over the next few months even if prices …
Much attention has been devoted to the Omicron-fuelled fourth COVID-19 wave ripping through South Africa but cases have picked up elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa as well, with especially sharp rises in Nigeria and Namibia. There are early signs of virus …
16th December 2021
Governments across the Gulf have begun to unveil their 2022 budgets and tight fiscal policy remains the order of the day. Saudi Arabia outlined a 6% cut in spending next year that is expected to push the budget into surplus for the first since 2013. And …
15th December 2021
Outside China, global inflation jumped from 5.0% to 5.5% in October, its highest level since 2008. And timely data point to a further rise in November. Base effects, fading ‘re-opening’ inflation, and falling commodity prices will drag on headline …
14th December 2021
The latest EM central bank meetings confirmed that policymakers in Emerging Europe and Latin America are still focused on high and rising inflation (see Chart 1), rather than any downside risk to the economic outlook from the Omicron variant. Central …
10th December 2021
While the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant has increased the downside risks to our GDP forecasts, it has arguably increased the upside risks to our CPI inflation forecasts. The transmissibility, severity and capacity for Omicron to escape …
7th December 2021
High frequency data show that travel to retail and recreation destinations, restaurant bookings and flights have all declined in the past few weeks as coronavirus restrictions have been tightened in the face of rising hospitalisations. (See Chart 1.) It …
6th December 2021
The emergence of the Omicron strain of COVID-19 , a worrying new variant first detected in southern Africa, has already rattled financial markets. The economic impact on Sub-Saharan Africa and around the world will depend on how transmissible it is, the …
30th November 2021
The Middle East and North African economies are potentially among the most vulnerable to the fallout from the Omicron strain of COVID-19 . The North African economies as well as Lebanon and Jordan have low vaccination rates and large tourism sectors, …
COVID-19 outbreaks have diverged across the region in the past month, with new cases and deaths falling recently in the hard-hit Eastern European countries of Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia, stabilising in Russia and Turkey but rising sharply in parts of …
The global spread of a more transmissible COVID variant is a particular challenge for a country trying to remain COVID-free. But after nearly two years of success suppressing infections domestically (see Chart 1), the bar to changing course before better …
29th November 2021
Amid all the uncertainty caused by the arrival of Omicron (for our initial thoughts see this Global Update ), one thing we can say with some conviction is that the new variant is further bad news for the region’s beleaguered tourism industry. Up until …
While the RBNZ has lifted interest rates by 50bp and signalled that as much as 200bp of tightening is still to come, the RBA’s central scenario remains that interest rates won’t be raised until 2024. While we have pencilled in the first RBA rate hike for …
Political developments in Latin America have generally turned in investors’ favour this month. Right-wing José Antonio Kast beat his left-wing rival, Gabriel Boric, in the first round of Chile’s presidential election which buoyed local markets. Elsewhere, …
24th November 2021
The repeal this month of controversial reforms aimed at liberalising the agriculture sector is arguably the biggest political setback that the Modi government has faced since coming to power in 2014. And while the direct economic impact of abandoning …
The sharp slowdown in the pace of hiring in the October Labour Force Survey caught the headlines, but the more important development was the sharp rise in fixed-weight average hourly earnings. Based on our seasonal adjustment, the fixed-weight index, …
23rd November 2021
Inflation in the emerging world has generally surprised to the upside in recent months. But while inflation in most parts of Asia remains at levels which central banks are comfortable with, it has risen well above target in much of Emerging Europe and …
19th November 2021
Whether Jerome Powell or Lael Brainard is given the nod over the coming days, the next 12-18 months are shaping up to be an unusually challenging period for the Fed Chair. The October data showed a renewed jump in CPI inflation to a 30-year high, with …
18th November 2021
While October’s trade data showed good exports still depressed by the recent collapse in domestic car production (see Chart 1), there is growing anecdotal evidence that the auto sector is on the cusp of a rapid rebound. Toyota said that its global …
Recent indicators confirm that the global recovery has continued, but also that it has entered a slower and more difficult phase. US GDP growth slowed sharply in Q3, and our China Activity Proxy suggests that there was a large contraction there. (See …
11th November 2021
We’ve been warning for a while that CPI inflation would rise further than most people expect and have recently pushed our own forecast even higher. We now think CPI inflation will rise from 3.1% in September to 4.0% in October and to almost 5.0% in April …
10th November 2021
Economic growth has slowed sharply as output approaches its pre-pandemic level. We think that GDP will probably increase by only around 0.5% q/q in the final quarter, down from 2.2% in Q3. Manufacturing firms in Germany are struggling more than most and a …
8th November 2021
Trimmed mean inflation rose to 2.1% in Australia in Q3, the first time it has entered the RBA’s 2-3% target band since 2015. Even more strikingly, trimmed mean inflation in New Zealand rose to 4.4%, way above the top end of the RBNZ’s 1-3% target. One …
29th October 2021
Despite a flurry of media reports in September hinting at widespread disruption, the data suggest that China’s recent power shortages have not been too severe. Electricity output actually rose 0.6% in seasonally-adjusted m/m terms last month, the fastest …
COVID-19 vaccine coverage remains pitifully low across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, with less than 10% of populations having received at least a first dose in most countries. But there are signs that things may be slowly turning a corner. The rate of …
28th October 2021
The Gulf countries will be among the biggest winners globally from the recent rally in energy prices but most other parts of the Middle East and North Africa are net oil importers and are likely to be negatively affected. Higher energy prices will push up …
27th October 2021
The near-term outlook for South East Asia has improved dramatically over the past month or so. Daily cases of COVID-19 have collapsed and are now less than one-third of the level they were at in August. With vaccination rollouts also making good progress …
The growing likelihood that Brazil’s government will circumvent its spending cap adds to broader signs that austerity is becoming politically difficult to implement across the region. For instance, Ecuadorian President Lasso recently U-turned on a plan to …
26th October 2021
COVID-19 outbreaks have surged across the region in the past month. Record high daily cases have been reported in Russia, Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia and infections are rising sharply elsewhere. Governments have tightened containment measures, including …
Wage growth remained moderate over the summer but, with labour shortages intensifying, it seems likely to accelerate sharply soon. The Bank of Canada’s third-quarter Business Outlook Survey (BOS) added to the evidence of widespread labour shortages, which …
The extent of the shift in investors’ expectations of interest rates over the past month has been staggering. Investors are now pricing in an 80% chance of a hike to Bank Rate, from 0.10% to 0.25%, at the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting on 4 th …
22nd October 2021
We are confident in our new forecasts that GDP growth will be a disappointing 2.7% in 2022 and 2.0% in 2023, while core inflation remains elevated at close to 3%, but we are less confident in our predictions of how the Fed will react to that particular …
21st October 2021
The latest activity data suggest that India's recovery has entered a slower phase, with global supply shortages starting to weigh on the economy too. In addition, India’s vaccination coverage remains low, leaving the economy exposed to the threat of …
20th October 2021
While parts of Japan’s manufacturing sector remain under severe pressure from global supply chain shortages, domestic headwinds to the recovery have dissipated further in recent weeks. That supports our view that a strong rebound is brewing. Breaking …
19th October 2021
The supply shortages that have affected many DMs have also intensified in emerging economies over the past couple of months. The automotive sector has been hit hard by global semiconductor shortages, weighing on recoveries in Mexico, Czechia and Hungary …
18th October 2021
Supply shortages and rising energy prices are becoming stronger headwinds to the euro-zone recovery. The latest data from Germany showed sharp falls in industrial orders and production (see Chart 1), with manufacturers citing supply bottlenecks as a …
7th October 2021
We still don’t have enough data to judge the extent of the disruption to China’s factory output from power rationing with much certainty. But with supply chains already stretched, even a modest hit to output, which producers downstream might normally …
30th September 2021
The threat of messy outcomes to Sub-Saharan Africa’s debt problems seems to have diminished recently. In Zambia, the new administration vowed to tackle debt problems and press on with restructuring talks under the G20’s Common Framework. And Ethiopia, …
The RBA expects headline inflation to drop back from 3.8% in Q2 to 1.5% by mid-2022. By contrast, we now only expect it to fall to 2.5% over this period, reflecting the pass-through from soaring coal, gas and food prices. We also expect the recent …
Over the past month or so, the central banks of Korea, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have all raised interest rates, but we don’t think other countries will be in any rush to follow suit. There is certainly little to worry about on the inflation front. …
29th September 2021
Economies across Emerging Europe enjoyed a rapid rebound in Q2, but all the signs suggest that the recovery has come off the boil in Q3. Surveys of sentiment in services sectors have started to flatline and, in some cases, fall. What’s more, hard activity …
Inflation in many economies in the region has risen to multi-year highs in recent months. In general, this has been driven higher by a combination of unfavourable base effects from the pandemic, as well as some re-opening inflation and the effects of …
28th September 2021
Falling new virus cases and the lifting of restrictions have boosted economies across the region in Q3, but the deteriorating external backdrop will put a lid on growth from here. Even with an orderly resolution to the Evergrande saga , a slowdown in …
Labour shortages have intensified in recent months, which could both act as a brake on the recovery and lead to a stronger acceleration in wage growth. According to the CFIB Business Barometer, the share of small firms suffering from labour shortages …
27th September 2021
Speculation is building that India will be included in major global bond indices over the next year or so. If that happens, it would highlight the local bond market’s growing maturity and be cast as a coup by the government, for which bond index inclusion …
22nd September 2021
The latest data provide mixed signals on the impact that the Delta variant is having on the economy. The high frequency indicators for high contact services suggest that activity levelled out in August and weakened a little in early September (See Chart …
21st September 2021
Problems at Evergrande in China have dominated the headlines recently, but (sovereign) debt risks are brewing in other EMs too. Concerns about higher government spending and rising public debt levels are building in parts of Latin America . Meanwhile, …
The race to become the new LDP leader – and with it PM – formally began on Friday. With Delta cases plunging and the vaccination rate having caught up with many other advanced economies, whoever wins should be able to lift domestic restrictions and ride a …
20th September 2021
