Our Insights

Less than two weeks after his inauguration, President Trump followed through on his promises and announced 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, as well as a 10% tariff on Chinese imports.

Inflation is very much back on the Federal Reserve's radar. When the central bank left rates unchanged in late January, Governor Jerome Powell indicated that the Fed was in no rush to ease policy until there are substantial changes in labor and consumer-price trends. By contrast, just weeks ago, markets had viewed relatively benign US inflation data with a sigh of relief.

The Bank of England cut interest rates on Thursday, sending the pound and bond yields lower. Even as the central bank signaled concern about inflation, the overall message suggested that the economy is a bigger worry and more monetary easing is to come. (Some policy makers even voted for a two-notch, 50-basis-point rate cut, surprising the markets.)

The US economy grew at a slower-than-expected pace in the last quarter of 2024, expanding at a 2.3% quarter-on-quarter annualized rate. That trailed the 2.6% consensus estimate.

The Jan. 24 interest-rate hike in Japan was widely anticipated. But the inflation data released the same day strongly justified the Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) decision to raise the deposit rate to 0.5%, the highest level since the global financial crisis.

With Donald Trump barely into his first month in power, his short-lived clash with Colombia shows the leverage the US holds over trading partners dependent on the American market.

India's budget will be presented on Feb. 1, with most observers expecting restraint with a view to whittling down the post-pandemic debt load. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is tasked with lowering the nation's interest payments and obtaining a sovereign rating upgrade from international credit agencies -- while also supporting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious growth plans with infrastructure spending. (The budget comes in the wake of Modi's election disappointment last year, which saw the prime minister retain power but lose his party's electoral majority for the first time in a decade.)

Indonesia's central bank has a dual mandate: control inflation, but also ensure stability in the rupiah's exchange rate. We created a probability model that gathers different indicators to assess the likelihood of Bank Indonesia's next move. It was trained on monthly data spanning 2014-2022.

Brazil’s ongoing economic strength is having a particularly favorable impact in its historically under-developed Northeast, which accounts for about 20% of the Brazilian landmass and is home to about 55 million people. President Lula has earmarked his home turf for aggressive investment, while a growing number of tourists are visiting the region's beaches and historic cities. This increased economic activity is showing up in services demand.

Before 2020, China's deficit-to-GDP ratio consistently remained below 3%. As the nation gradually rolls out more stimulus to support growth, that ratio has been increasing, but stands well below levels seen in advanced economies.

The US economy ended 2024 with its strongest performance in almost three years, according to CEIC's latest nowcast. Our machine learning-driven model projects that real gross domestic product expanded at a 4% year-on-year pace in the fourth quarter. That's the strongest performance since the first three months of 2022, when the economy was snapping back from the pandemic; it's also a substantial acceleration from the 2.7% pace seen in 3Q.

Bolivia is in the midst of an economic and political crisis. Declining natural-gas production has crippled the country's ability to earn dollars; import costs have surged as a result, sending inflation soaring. As our first chart shows, consumer price inflation reached a 16-year high of 9.97% year-on-year in November. A similar increase has been observed for the producer price index (PPI) - a recent addition to the CEIC database.