This article from Bloomberg may be of interest. Here is a section:
“While the strong labour market trends and sticky core services inflation suggest a 25bp hike at the May FOMC, markets are increasingly looking toward the end of the hiking cycle, with cut timing also top of mind,” said Ryan McKay, a commodity strategist at TD Securities.
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Warren Buffett called electric-car maker BYD Company Ltd. “extraordinary” and said chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is a “fabulous enterprise.” That hasn’t stopped him from selling shares of both firms.
“We’ll find things to do with the money that I’ll feel better about,” the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman and chief executive officer said of BYD in an interview with CNBC in Tokyo Wednesday. He said Berkshire wasn’t in a hurry to reduce that stake after recently trimming its holdings of BYD H shares to 10.9% from 11.13%, according to a filing this week.
The billionaire investor took credit for Berkshire’s investment in TSMC amid speculation that one of his investing deputies picked the stock. He said the decision to reduce its stake in the business by 86% in the fourth quarter — which could have fetched $3.7 billion assuming the shares were sold at the average price over the period — resulted from concerns over geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan, conditions he described as being outside of the company’s control.
“I re-evaluated that part of it,” Buffett said. “I didn’t re-evaluate the business, the management, or anything of the sort.”
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LVMH, Europe’s largest company by market value, has now made it to the world’s top 10.
A first-quarter sales beat sparked a 5% increase in the share price Thursday, giving the luxury powerhouse a 29% rally for the year. That, along with a gain in the euro against the dollar, lifted LVMH’s market capitalization to $486 billion, briefly ranking it as the world’s 10th-biggest company. Should it reach $500 billion, it would become the first European company to achieve that milestone.
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To be sure, homeowners remortgaging on a fixed-rate deal are likely to benefit from a lower loan-to-value ratio than when they first secured a mortgage. That’s because UK house prices have grown by more than 11% since March 2021, according to Nationwide Building Society, and households have paid off a chunk of capital over the last two years.
Crucially, high-LTV lending makes up only a small fraction of UK mortgages, with 90% or higher LTV deals accounting for about 5% of all new home loans in the last quarter of 2022, BOE data shows. And even those borrowers who took out a 90% LTV in September 2021 are likely to see higher costs cushioned by stronger wage growth, according to Iwona Hovenko, an analyst covering European real estate for Bloomberg Intelligence.
“Homeowners who took mortgages at 90% LTV in 2021 could now see it drop to 75%,” she said. What’s more, “the extra post-tax pay after just two years could more-or-less offset the cash increase in monthly mortgage repayments.”
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The African country of Niger currently has the highest fertility rate, at 6.9, which means on average, a woman in Niger will have seven children in her lifetime.
With the exception of Afghanistan (14th), all of the top 30 countries are found on the African continent. In fact, it’s estimated that Africa will add 2.5 billion new people by 2100, while most continents will actually flatline in terms of population growth.
At the bottom of the rankings, the country with the lowest fertility rate is South Korea, at 0.84.
Interestingly, many of the current most populous countries of the world—including China, India, and the U.S.—are all below replacement levels of fertility, with parts of Europe and North America having had persistently low fertility levels since the 1970s.
This note from Bloomberg Economics may be of interest. Here is a section:
Investment is set to power a pickup in India's growth in the year ahead. An increase in public capital expenditure and incentives aimed at expanding manufacturing capacity are set to spark a private-investment cycle. The Reserve Bank's hold in April after a series of rate hikes to fight inflation also signals a shift to supporting growth.
Investment is set to power a pickup in India’s growth in the year ahead. An increase in public capital expenditure and incentives aimed at expanding manufacturing capacity are set to spark a private-investment cycle. The Reserve Bank’s hold in April after a series of rate hikes to fight inflation also signals a shift to supporting growth.
We forecast the expansion in GDP to accelerate to 5.9% year on year in the first quarter of 2024 from an estimated 5.0% in 1Q23.
On a full-year basis, growth will be distorted by pandemic effects — a low base contributed to a surge to 7.1% in fiscal 2023. Coming off the high comparison, growth is poised to slow to 6% in fiscal 2024.
Inflation is likely to slide to 5.3% on average in fiscal 2024 from 6.7% in fiscal 2023, due to lower commodity prices, lagged impacts of the RBI’s rate hikes, and base effects.
We see the RBI keeping its repo rate on hold at 6.5% through the end of 2023, avoiding over-tightening that could damage the economy. As consumer prices cool, we expect it to ease in 1Q24 to add support for the recovery.
This article from MarketWatch may be of interest. Here it is in full:
Shares of Pioneer Natural Resources Co. powered up 6.4% toward an eight-week high, to pace the S&P 500's premarket gainers, after the Wall Street Journal reported that the fracking company has held preliminary talks with Exxon Mobil Corp. over a possible acquisition. Exxon's stock fell 0.9% while futures for the S&P 500 shed 0.5%. ahead of Monday's open. Citing people familiar with the matter, the WSJ report published Friday said the discussions have been informal, but with Exxon flush with cash after recording record profits in 2022, the oil giant has been exploring options. Pioneer Natural's stock has lost 8.9% year to date through Thursday, while Exxon shares have tacked on 4.3% and the S&P 500 has gained 6.9%.
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Ether's dominance rate remains stagnant between 19% and 20%. That compares with a rise to 21% from 14% in the weeks before a software upgrade last September known as the Merge. That technological overhaul replaced Ethereum's at-the-time energy-intensive proof-of-work mechanism of verifying transactions with a proof-of-stake system and set the stage for Shanghai. Staking involves depositing coins in the blockchain to boost the network's security and verify transactions in return for rewards.
Investor caution in pricing ether ahead of Shanghai stems from several factors, including concerns tokens unlocked after the upgrade will flood the market and regulatory issues.
"The Shanghai upgrade will unlock over 18 million ether staked since late 2020. The market is worried that the unlocking may bring about a sell-off, causing uncertainty in the market," Griffin Ardern, a volatility trader at crypto asset-management firm Blofin, told CoinDesk.
