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The economies of Latin America are far from homogeneous. Many share characteristics, however, that have conspired to make the region among the hardest hit in the world. In some places lockdowns have been stringent: Peru, for example, took the extraordinary step of closing its mines, the foundation of its economy, contributing to the IMF 's grim forecast of a decline in output of 14% this year.
This may worth something:
Collateral damage - Trade finance stumbles into the digital era | Finance & economics | The
"I N WARM WEATHER, fewer people wear socks," says Paul Rotstein of Gold Medal International, a wholesaler in New York. People may not sport socks in the summer but his firm starts shipping them to retailers in July, ahead of the start of the school year. There is, however, a big lag before he is paid. He normally uses trade-credit insurance to protect against the risk that his invoices go unpaid, but this year the insurers have slashed the amounts they are willing to cover by 50-90%.
Take operational troubles first. Trade finance is notoriously paper-based. Processing credit requires involved parties, from financiers and carriers to warehouse managers and customs officers, to exchange an average of 36 documents and 240 copies. But lockdowns trapped bits of paper in shut-down offices. Printing became a palaver. When couriers eventually got to banks, they often found no one there.
The 'Rocket Ship' Economic Recovery Is Crashing - The New York Times
The nascent restart of America's economy has begun to stall as a surge in new coronavirus cases dampens consumer and business activity across states like Florida, Texas and Arizona.
After weeks of a pandemic-induced contraction, the economy had begun rebounding faster than many economists expected from mid-April into June, as infection rates stabilized or fell across much of the country and the federal government injected trillions of dollars in the economy. States began to reopen, shoppers increased their spending and employers started to hire back furloughed workers.
Helping youth enterprise take off, will bring sustainable returns, say UN economists | | UN News
Young entrepreneurs who want their work to have a positive impact on their communities, urgently need more help from governments if they're to succeed and resist the COVID-19-fuelled economic downturn, UN economists said on Thursday.
Amid worsening global employment prospects owing to the pandemic, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) maintained in a new report that unlocking business opportunities for young adults "could lower unemployment and bring social benefits".
Quite a lot has been going on:
The house wins - America's housing market is so far unfazed by recession | Finance &
A MERICA'S HOUSING market is behaving oddly. Residential property—worth $35trn, slightly more than America's stockmarket—seems strangely oblivious to the economic carnage around it. House prices in May were 4.3% higher than a year earlier. That rate of growth is only marginally below the average since the end of the housing crash a decade ago. Prices in even the costliest places, such as San Francisco, where the average pad sets you back $1.1m, continue to march upwards.
At first glance this is surprising. House prices typically nosedive during recessions. A rising number of mortgage defaults leads to more properties being put up for sale. Falling household incomes reduce buyers' purchasing power. In the recession of the early 1990s house prices dropped by 10% in real terms; they fell by three times that in the downturn that followed the financial crisis of 2007-09.
Japan's middle class is 'disappearing' as poverty rises, warns economist
As poverty rises in Japan, the country's middle class is slowly eroding away, according to a recent report by Oxford Economics' Shigeto Nagai.
"After the bubble burst in the 1990s, income has declined across the income percentiles, and the share of low-income households has risen as those of middle- and high-income groups shrink," Nagai, who is head of Japan economics at the firm, wrote in the report.
A True Economic Stimulus Plan - WSJ
The White House will soon begin negotiating with congressional Democrats on a "Phase 4" economic revival plan. President Trump has repeatedly expressed his support for suspending the payroll tax through the end of the year as a way to stimulate jobs and help low- and middle-income families gain after-tax income. Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes the idea.
Schumpeter - How Chesapeake Energy changed the world | Business | The Economist
D RILLING FOR oil and gas is a contest of man and machine against nature. In America's shale formations, nature takes the form of rocks, rich in hydrocarbons, buried about a mile (1.6 kilometres) below ground. It is a geologist's job to find those rocks. It is an engineer's job to develop the right mix of water, chemicals and drilling technology to "hydraulically fracture" them.
The two "Okies" who founded Chesapeake Energy, a pioneer of this hydrocarbon upheaval, were neither geologists nor engineers. Tom Ward and the late Aubrey McClendon were "landmen". Their skill was in leasing mineral rights and persuading investors they would produce a bonanza, particularly of natural gas, if enough wells were drilled. Their success was extraordinary. At times in the 2000s Chesapeake was considered the Google of energy. It had leases with 1m Americans.
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