CNN (January 15)
“Germany’s economy shrank last year for the first time since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic… increasing the risk of an economic contraction in the wider euro area.” GDP dropped 0.3%, both during 2023 overall and during Q4. “The data bodes ill for the entire area that uses the euro because Germany is the largest of its 20 economies.”
The Korea Economic Daily (June 15)
“Everything Asian policymakers were sure they knew about 2023 is going sideways.” When the year opened, “conventional wisdom” expected “Chinese growth would help the region make up for lost economic time.” Now the worry “is about deflation risks as factory-gate prices go negative” with consumer prices in China “on the verge of contraction.” Its exports are “cratering,” but China’s falling imports are “the bigger problem for Korea, and Asia more broadly.” In May, China’s imports fell by 4.5%, “dampening hopes that post-pandemic ‘revenge spending’ by 1.4 billion Chinese would propel Asian growth sharply higher.”
Tags: Asia, China, Consumer prices, Contraction, Cratering, Deflation risks, Exports, Factory-gate prices, Growth, Imports, Korea, Negative, Policymakers, Sideways
Bloomberg (January 21)
“In a week marked by fresh recession angst from Wall Street to Davos, JPMorgan Chase & Co. finds the odds of an economic downturn priced into financial markets have actually fallen sharply from their 2022 highs.” In October, “a contraction was effectively seen as a done deal across markets.” Now, “according to the firm’s trading model, seven of nine asset classes from high-grade bonds to European stocks now show less than a 50% chance of a recession. That’s a big reversal.”
Tags: Angst, Asset classes, Bonds, Contraction, Davos, Economic downturn, Financial markets, JPMorgan Chase, Recession, Stocks, Trading model, Wall Street
BBC (October 27)
“The impact of Brexit on the UK economy will be worse in the long run compared to the coronavirus pandemic.” According to Richard Hughes, the chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, “leaving the EU will reduce the UK’s potential GDP by about 4% in the long term” while the impact of the pandemic is forecast as a 2% contraction of GDP.
New York Times (May 18)
“With much of the country under a state of emergency and deaths climbing,” Japan’s “yo-yoing economic pattern” is expected to continue “until the country has vaccinated a significant portion of its population.” Given the “plodding” pace of its vaccination program, this “dynamic could potentially push the country back into recession — defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction — later this year, as it struggles to check the spread of deadlier and more contagious coronavirus variants.”
Tags: Contagious, Contraction, Coronavirus, Deadlier, Deaths, Economy, Japan, Recession, Spread, State of emergency, Struggles, Vaccination, Yo-yoing
Wall Street Journal (August 13)
“The U.K. recorded a steeper second-quarter contraction than its peers, suffering the worst economic hit from the coronavirus in Europe as well as reporting the highest death toll there.” Great Britain’s GDP “shrank 20.4% in the second quarter, equivalent to an annualized rate of 59.8%,…. In the same period, U.S. and German output declined by around 10%, while Italy lost 12%, France 14% and Spain 19%.”
Tags: Contraction, Coronavirus, Death toll, Economic hit, Europe, France, GDP, Germany, Italy, Output, Peers, Suffering, U.K., U.S.
South China Morning Post (April 17)
“China’s economy shrank by 6.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2020, the first contraction since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, confirming the economic damage done by the coronavirus pandemic.” The massive contraction “was worse than predictions of minus 6.0 per cent from a survey of analysts’ forecasts by Bloomberg.”
Tags: Analysts, China, Contraction, Coronavirus, Cultural Revolution, Economic damage, Economy, Pandemic
CNN (January 3)
“Evidence is mounting that the US-China trade war is dealing a blow to the American stock market. Stocks plunged on Thursday after Apple (AAPL) blamed a big sales miss on slowing growth in China and rising trade tensions. China’s massive manufacturing sector… has tumbled into contraction. And trade trouble helped fuel the biggest one-month decline in US factory activity since the Great Recession.”
Tags: Apple, China, Contraction, Decline, Evidence, Great Recession, Growth, Manufacturing, Plunged, Stock market, Tensions, Trade war, U.S.
Bloomberg (October 12)
“China’s car market has been one of the most reliable engines of global growth for decades. Now that all might be coming to an end…. Purchases of passenger vehicles by dealerships plunged for a third straight month…. The industry is now facing the prospect of its first contraction since at least the 1990s.”
Tags: Car market, China, Contraction, Global growth, Passenger vehicles, Plunged, Purchases, Reliable
Reuters (April 28)
“Global shipments of smartphones shrank 3 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier in the market’s first year-on-year contraction on record…reflecting growing strains on the industry.” Q1 shipments dropped to 334.6 million devices from 345 million in 2015.
Tags: Contraction, Industry, Q1, Record, Shipments, Shrank, Smartphones, Strains
