After a volatile year and a seemingly robust start to 2012, Mark Schaltuper, Head of Europe Country Risk & Financial Markets, asked Business Monitor’s Commodities team what the outlook for commodities is for the remainder of the year. John Davies, Ed Coughlan and Ophelie Buchet share their views on the upside potential for the commodity… [Read more]
US Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Wednesday, January 25, called for the United States to expand its space programme. In particular, he stated that the US would have a permanent base on the moon by the end of his putative second term, ie January 2021. This echoed former president George W. Bush’s goal of… [Read more]
Business Monitor Online has recently published two new analyses on North East Asia. China: With the economy heading towards a ‘hard landing’, we believe it will become increasingly difficult for the central government to report strong growth figures. While the headline GDP figure is as much a political issue as an economic one, a greater… [Read more]
Monetary data out of China released over the past week have bolstered investor sentiment. Chinese CPI (consumer price index) continued to fall in December 2011, coming in at a 15-month low of 4.1% y-o-y (compared with the 6.5% high registered in June), while producer price inflation was subdued at just 1.7%. Such disinflation raises hope… [Read more]
The future of North Korea has rightly received greater attention following the sudden death of Kim Jong Il in December, and my colleagues and I have written about latest developments extensively on Business Monitor Online. In fact, we have been talking about the succession process and outlining scenarios for the country’s evolution for some years… [Read more]
Business Monitor International (BMI)’s Politburo Standing Committee sat down yesterday to discuss our thoughts on China in 2012. Below is a brief summary of what we talked about. These notes were prepared for internal circulation, but given the importance of China, and the fact that our regular readers are probably already familiar with our views,… [Read more]
As 2012 begins, the final verdict on 2011 growth is taking shape. BMI‘s expectation is that the US economy will sustain some of the momentum that it began to pick up late in 2011, whereas the eurozone and Chinese economies will continue to demonstrate weakness. This is borne out by purchasing managers’ index (PMI) data… [Read more]
