Singapore’s August non-oil domestic exports (NODX) expanded 2.7%from a year earlier, official data showed on Friday, the slowest pace since November due to a drop in non-electronics shipments. The year-on-year export growth was below economists’ expectations in a Reuters poll for a 8.3% rise and compared with 12.7% growth in July. On a seasonally adjusted month-on-month basis, exports fell 3.6% in August, Enterprise Singapore data showed, versus the prior month’s 0.9% contraction. Economists had forecast 2.4% growth. Source: Reuters (Reporting by Chen Lin in Singapore; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)

Sentiment among U.S. consumers remained broadly unchanged in early September, staying at subdued levels after August’s big drop triggered by the increase in Covid-19 cases due to the spread of the Delta variant. The preliminary estimate of the index of consumer sentiment released Friday by the University of Michigan was 71.0 in September, slightly up from 70.3 in August and below the 72.0 consensus forecast from economists polled by The Wall Street Journal. “The steep August falloff in consumer sentiment ended in early September, but the small gain still meant ...

1/CENTRALLY FOCUSED Several central banking big-hitters meet in coming days, with the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Sept. 21-22 meeting topping the must-watch list. The timing of the Fed’s U.S. tapering plans remains the key question and recent data suggests caution may be warranted: the U.S. economy created the fewest jobs in seven months in August and consumer prices increased at their slowest pace in six months. Several officials say the Fed’s tapering of its pandemic stimulus will start this year, a view Fed chief Jerome Powell may echo, while stressing an ...

International air traffic to Greece picked up strongly in August at the peak of the summer tourism season, civil aviation authority data showed on Friday. Arrivals nearly doubled in that month to 3,042,098, from 1,666,222 a year earlier when the world was gripped by the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the data. Greece, where about a fifth of economic output comes from tourism, suffered its most severe air traffic slump on record in 2020, with arrivals down 75% from the previous year. This year, with vaccination rollouts ...

British retail sales volumes unexpectedly fell last month in what is now their longest streak of declines since current records began, though sales volumes still remain above pre-pandemic levels, official data showed on Friday. Sales dropped 0.9% on the month in August versus economists’ average forecasts in a Reuters poll for a rise of 0.5%, leading to their fourth consecutive monthly decline after previous months were revised lower, the Office for National Statistics said. August’s drop appeared partly to reflect reduced supermarket sales as more people ate outside home following ...

Taiwan’s government called on the European Union to quickly begin trade talks after the bloc pledged to seek a trade deal with the tech-heavyweight island, something Taipei has long angled for. The EU included Taiwan on its list of trade partners for a potential bilateral investment agreement in 2015, the year before President Tsai Ing-wen first became Taiwan’s president but has not held talks with Taiwan on the issue since then. Responding to the EU’s newly announced strategy to boost its presence in the Indo-Pacific, including seeking a trade deal ...

The British public’s expectations for inflation rose last month but remained within levels seen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite a recent jump in headline inflation, a Bank of England survey showed on Friday. Inflation expectations for the year ahead rose to 2.7% in August from 2.4% in May, according to the survey, which was conducted by market research firm Kantar. They have kept in a range of 2.4% to 2.9% since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Longer-term inflation expectations rose to 3.0% from 2.7% in May, ...

Some European Central Bank policymakers believe that the bank’s inflation forecasts, which were raised only last week, are still too pessimistic, Governing Council member Gabriel Makhlouf said on Friday. However Makhlouf, Ireland’s central bank chief, said fears of excessive euro zone inflation are overstated “at the moment” and that notwithstanding the “considerable uncertainty” about the persistence of price pressures, the current pick-up is transitory. Euro zone inflation has been rising more than expected recently and hit a 10-year high of 3.0% in August, data confirmed on Friday, challenging the ECB’s ...

European Central Bank (ECB) chief economist Philip Lane revealed in a private meeting with German economists that the ECB expects to hit its 2% inflation goal by 2025, the Financial Times said on Thursday in a report that was partly disputed by the bank. The ECB had not made this long-term forecast public, meaning Lane could face questions from the public and lawmakers about the report, which suggests he revealed unpublished information to a select group of individuals. The FT added that Lane told the German economists that the ECB’s ...

The United Arab Emirates could invest at least a further 1 billion pounds ($1.4 billion) in the United Kingdom this year after pledging 10 billion pounds this week to its investment partnership with the British government. The UK’s Trade Commissioner to the Middle East, Simon Penney, told Reuters on Friday there was “line of sight” on a minimum of one billion pounds of transactions between now and the end of the year. “The expectations are high that it will reach a 2 billion (pound) watermark this year,” Penney said of ...

The global economic recovery is still proceeding rapidly but it is hitting speed limits, says Fitch Ratings in its latest Global Economic Outlook (GEO). An unprecedented boom in consumer demand for durable goods has stretched the capacity of global suppliers. Supply bottlenecks are curbing the rate of output expansion and creating near-term inflationary pressures. “These pressures should ease significantly in 2022 as demand growth moderates and supply responds. But price pressures are shifting the tone of the policy debate. Fiscal and monetary policy support for growth will start to wane ...

China has filed an application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the commerce ministry said, as the world’s second-biggest economy looks to bolster its clout in trade. Commerce Minister Wang Wentao submitted China’s application to join the free trade agreement in a letter to New Zealand’s trade minister, Damien O’Connor, the Chinese ministry said in a statement late on Thursday. The CPTPP was signed by 11 countries including Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan and New Zealand in 2018. Before that, it was known as the Trans-Pacific ...

The uptick in the credit growth in the recent months notwithstanding the second COVID-19 wave augurs well for the economy, said an article published in the RBI’s latest bulletin. Bank credit growth has witnessed significant fluctuations in the past one and a half decades. The period between 2007-08 and 2013-14 could be characterised as a bank credit boom period in the Indian economy, as non-food credit registered double-digit growth, primarily driven by robust credit growth to the industrial sector, the article said. “Both dominant-group and other-group of banks lent aggressively ...

The European Central Bank is not foreseeing an interest hike in the euro zone in 2023, ECB policymaker Pablo Hernandez de Cos said on Friday. The comments from De Cos came after ECB chief economist Philip Lane revealed in a private meeting with German economists that the ECB expected to hit its 2% inflation goal by 2025, the Financial Times said on Thursday in a report that was partly disputed by the bank. De Cos, who did not want to make a comment on the inflation target, said that “the ...

China will extend tariff exemptions for 81 products imported from the United States by seven months, the finance ministry said in a statement published on Thursday. China has routinely made such extensions as part of an initial agreement to end a bruising trade war between the world’s two biggest economies. The items had received exemptions from retaliatory tariffs imposed by China on U.S. goods as countermeasures to U.S. Section 301 action, the ministry said. The exemptions for items including some shrimp and electric vehicle batteries had been due to expire ...