(Reuters) – Peru’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrunk 0.63% in February compared with the same month last year, the government’s INEI statistics agency said on Saturday, beating expectations by analysts who forecast a bigger decline. It was a second successive month of decline after the economy began to contract in January following 22 months of…
By Joe Bavier WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Africa is struggling with the triple shock of rising debt burdens, an ongoing food crisis and climate change fallout and needs more help from international institutions and wealthy nations to cope, African finance ministers said on Saturday. Developing African economies were only beginning to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic…
PARIS (Reuters) -French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday signed into law a deeply unpopular bill to raise the state pension age, infuriating unions that called for months of mass protests to continue. The proclamation of the law in the government’s official journal came hours after France’s Constitutional Council had approved the main pension-age increase in…
By Humeyra Pamuk HANOI (Reuters) -Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday expressed a desire to deepen their ties as Washington seeks to solidify alliances to counter an increasingly assertive China. In his first visit to the southeast Asian country as the top U.S. diplomat, Blinken…
By Riham Alkousaa BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany will pull the plug on its last three nuclear power stations by Saturday, ending a six-decade programme that spawned one of Europe’s strongest protest movements but saw a brief reprieve due to the Ukraine war. The smoking towers of Isar II, Emsland and Neckarwestheim II reactors were to…
By Nupur Anand, Tatiana Bautzer and Saeed Azhar NEW YORK (Reuters) -U.S. banking heavyweights reaped windfalls from higher interest payments in the first quarter, brushing off a crisis prompted by the collapse of two regional lenders and setting aside billions of dollars in case loans turn sour as the economic outlook dims. First-quarter 2023 earnings…
(Reuters) -Bank of England policymaker Silvana Tenreyro said past interest rate rises would take time to bear down on inflation, and that it was important not to over-adjust policy while the impact of these past rate rises was feeding through. “We need to be patient,” she said at a panel discussion hosted by the International…
(Reuters) – The International Monetary Fund is seeking “necessary” financing assurances from Pakistan as soon as possible to conclude a bailout pact with the South Asian nation, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday. Meetings between Pakistan and the IMF achieved agreement on the need to maintain strong policies and secure sufficient financing to support the country’s…
By John Revill and Noele Illien ZURICH/BERN (Reuters) -Switzerland’s tradition of dependable consensus politics has taken a battering after the government used an emergency law to push through a state-backed mega-merger of UBS and Credit Suisse, sidelining the country’s parliament. Switzerland’s two parliamentary chambers voted to reject the government’s 109 billion Swiss francs ($122.82 billion)…
By Horacio Soria and Juan Carlos Bustamante BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) -Argentina’s annual inflation rate soared to 104.3% in March, the official statistics agency said on Friday, one of the highest rates in the world, straining people’s wallets and stoking a cost-of-living crisis that has pushed up poverty. The inflation reading for the month came in…
