economy

According to latest reports, a slowdown in the housing market and a weakness in the construction industry only worsened amid higher costs. In your point of view, should we expect a further decrease in the UK economy? Why?

Our base case scenario is that we are expecting a slowdown in the UK economy in 2017. If we ask what has been propping the UK economy up since Brexit, the answer would be the consumer spending story; we have seen consumption being fairly resilient since Brexit. On the other hand, we have seen investment taper a little bit less, therefore, what has been driving the UK economy is really consumer spending.

Though, at this point, the outlook looks pretty bleak, especially if we take into account the fact that we have got a squeeze in household consumer incomes, coming from higher fuel prices, higher inflation, and a lack of wage inflation. Real incomes are being squeezed, which in theory leads to weaker consumer spending power. Thus, the channel which has been propping up the UK growth is likely to weaken a little bit going into 2017.

One key indicator of how a consumer-based economy is performing is car sales.

The current rally is now the second- longest in history and that equity prices are extraordinarily high with a P/E ratio of 25 or even more according to other calculations. The real economy does not justify Wall Street`s seductive optimism.

The dotcom bubble of 2000 was primarily an American affair that cost a lot of people a lot of money while the crisis of 2008 had far-reaching international implications

Switzerland’s economic growth projection for 2017 was downgraded as activity turned out disappointingly weak in the second half of last year.

In the Spring forecast, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said it expected economic growth of 1.6% in 2017, down from the forecast of 1.8% it gave in December. The downward adjustment to resulted from a "sluggish close of 2016," SECO said.

Progress in making women equal to men in the economy is painfully slow, and women are still more likely than men to live in poverty, says the report, entitled “An Economy that Works for Women” published by Oxfam.

According to the source, globally, the average gender pay gap is 23 percent and 700 million fewer women than men are in paid work. The compiled data reveal that women carry out between two and 10 times more unpaid care work than men, which is worth $10 trillion to the global economy each year, equivalent to over an eighth of the world’s entire GDP, “Women’s disproportionate responsibility for the work squeezes the amount of time that they have to go to school and earn a living.

The most beloved passport in the world by rich people is not American. European citizens are the owners of the most valuable passports in the world with the top ten spots all countries in Europe. But the world’s most powerful passport belongs to Sweden. The findings come from offshore consulting firm Nomad Capitalist, who have ranked 199 passports globally.

The Swiss economy expanded marginally in the fourth quarter, figures from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) showed Thursday.

Gross domestic product grew by a less-than-expected 0.1% sequentially, the same pace of expansion as seen in the third quarter. Economists had forecast a quarterly growth of 0.4%. The SECO had earlier estimated flat growth for the third quarter.

Switzerland’s export-oriented economy has faced headwinds due to the strength of the franc, which central bank policy makers have repeatedly called “significantly overvalued.” Better growth in the neighboring euro area may help Switzerland, where the manufacturing, retail and tourism sectors have all been negatively affected by the currency. Imports of goods logged a sequential growth of 0.2%, while services import declined 5.2%.
The year-on-year growth more than halved to 0.6% in the fourth quarter from a revised 1.4% in the previous quarter. Economists had forecast the growth rate to remain steady at the third quarter’s original figure of 1.3%.