Reports

China's New Year (also known as the Spring Festival) is the nation's most important holiday. It's also a key moment for the economy; as people travel to reunite with family, we can gather key data points on travel, leisure spending and more. A year ago, we wrote that domestic mobility during the Spring Festival was sending encouraging signals about post-pandemic consumer confidence.

Germans will vote on Feb. 23 amid sluggish economic growth that has lagged behind European peers and weighed on the national mood. In the corporate space, high energy prices that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine (and the sanctions that followed) disrupted Germany's export-oriented manufacturing model.

US inflation concerns have returned to center stage. More Federal Reserve cuts this year look less likely. Economists and consumers alike are becoming more worried that price increases will be too stubborn for the Fed to tame - even before any effects of President Trump's threatened tariffs feed through.

CEIC is pleased to announce the launch of its Point-in-Time (PiT) data offering, delivering over 10 years of meticulously maintained revised historical data—the longest revision history available in the market for the data sets carried by CEIC.

As we anticipated in our India budget preview, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman struck a balance between growth-supporting measures and easing the country's long-term debt burden. Middle-class tax cuts grabbed the headlines. But the budget also addressed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's priorities in agriculture, labor-intensive manufacturing and exports. Changes to the electricity market were also of note: India wants more nuclear energy, and is liberalizing rules in this sector to attract more private and foreign capital.

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.