Feb 20th 2025 | San Francisco A fter peaking in 2022 at 11% year on year, inflation across the rich world has steadily fallen. Until now. As central banks bring down interest rates, headline inflation across the rich world is edging up (see chart 1 ). It rose from 2.1% in September to 2.5% in

W hen, in october 2017, Wolfgang Schäuble left the Detlev Rohwedder Building for the final time after his stint as German finance minister, hundreds of civil servants, dressed all in black, waited under his window in the shape of a giant zero. Their schwarze Null symbolised the balanced budget, or surpluses, he had achieved since

“H e started it,” is playground justice. It may soon be America’s trade policy. On February 13th Donald Trump announced he had decided, for what he later called “purposes of fairness”, to employ reciprocal tariffs. When the levies will go into effect, and how they will apply, is uncertain. A memorandum directs federal agencies to

I f you are going to buy a flat in China, common advice goes, you should buy it from a “model student”. That is, a developer who has followed the rules, kept debts under control and refrained from excessive expansion. Vanke, a Shenzhen-based firm and one of China’s biggest homebuilders, once qualified as such. Its

Feb 20th 2025 | New York W HEN IT COMES to the finances of American consumers, the viral videos produced by Caleb Hammer, a personal-finance social-media star, provide some cause for concern. His “financial audits” of debt-laden guests have amassed almost 2m followers on TikTok and YouTube in less than three years. Mr Hammer’s interviewees—typically

J erome Powell’s press conferences—sometimes market-moving events—have attracted less notice of late. With Donald Trump in the White House, the chair of the Federal Reserve faces competition for attention. Yet a recent inflation reading has returned prices to the public eye. In January America’s “core” consumer price index, which strips out volatile food and energy

Feb 16th 2025 T he first proper winter in three years had already reignited energy debates. With temperatures frigid and Asian competition for supplies fierce, the spot price at the Dutch Transfer Title Facility (TTF), Europe’s gas-trading hub, hit €58 ($61) per megawatt hour (MWh) on February 10th, its highest in two years (see chart).

Feb 13th 2025 | Washington, DC A t a summit in Paris on February 10th and 11th, tech bosses vied to issue the most grandiose claim about artificial intelligence. “AI will be the most profound shift of our lifetimes,” is how Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s boss, put it. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said that

T he holiday from reality, for the happy few enjoying it, has been delightful. Three years ago it was still possible to fix a mortgage rate in Britain and much of the euro area at somewhere near 1%. American housing loans were dearer by just a percentage point or two. Even as interest rates have

Feb 13th 2025 W hile inflation has cooled almost everywhere, in Russia it is hotting up. Consumer prices rose by 9.5% year on year in December, up from 8.9% the previous month and uncomfortably above the central bank’s target of 4% (see chart). The prices of fruit and vegetables have risen by more than 20%