America’s pandemic savings are running out | Brics summit: Is a new bloc emerging to rival US leadership? | The world should study China’s crushing of Hong Kong’s freedoms

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click). For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium America's pandemic savings are running out - The Economist    FOR THE past year the success of America’s economy has rested on three pillars: a healthy labour market, falling inflation and robust spending fuelled by savings accumulated during the pandemic. This last pillar may be starting to give way. Research by Hamza Abdelrahman and Luiz Oliveira of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggests that Americans have burned through more than 90% of the “excess savings” they amassed in 2020 and 2021. What little remains, the economists estimate, is likely to be gone by the end of September. During the pandemic stimulus cheques and other government support boosted personal incomes by more than $1trn, while lockdown restrictions reduced Americans’ spending by another $1trn. As a result, monthly personal savings swelled from around 9% of income in 2019 to more than 30% in the spring of 2020, and 20% during the Alpha and Delta waves of the pandemic the next year. All told, Americans accumulated excess savings—the amount above what would be expected from pre-pandemic trends—of around $2.1trn. But data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a government agency, show that by June 2022 America’s personal-savings rate had plummeted to just 2.7%. Although the rate has ticked up slightly since then—in June households squirrelled away 4.3% of their incomes—it remains well below pre-pandemic levels. There are signs that a growing number of households are financially stretched. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show that credit-card debt now stands at more than $1trn, or around 4% of annual income—up 16% from a year ago. Late payments on credit-card and auto-loan debt are also rising (albeit from a low base). Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Brics summit: Is a new bloc emerging to rival US leadership? - BBC News    The announced expansion of the five-nation Brics club of emerging economies was described as "historic" by Chinese President Xi Jinping, but it is still not clear how far the countries' common interests stretch. The growth of Brics "will… further strengthen the force for world peace and development" the president said while addressing the leaders gathered at a conference centre in South Africa's commercial hub, Johannesburg. The Brics countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - are often seen as a counterweight to the Western-led world. Continued here The world should study China's crushing of Hong Kong's freedoms - The Economist    “HONG KONG is becoming less and less relevant,” says a Western diplomat in the city. On the face of it, that is an odd claim. Lots of foreign governments take Hong Kong seriously, noting each step of the financial centre’s journey towards autocracy. Only last month the governments of America, Australia and Britain formally protested when the authorities in Hong Kong announced bounties of HK$1m ($128,000) on eight democracy activists living as exiles in their respective countries. The territory’s chief executive, John Lee, a former police officer, pledged that the eight will be “pursued for life” and “spend their days in fear”. This was not mere bluster. In recent times police have swooped on Hong Kong-based family members of those exiles, questioning them for hours about contacts with their relatives. The European Union’s latest annual report on Hong Kong, published on August 18th, is both grim and thorough. It describes the arrests of hundreds of opposition politicians, journalists and democracy activists, among them a retired Roman Catholic cardinal in his 90s, under a national-security law imposed on the city by the central government in Beijing. The report catalogues new pressures and controls on schools and universities, environmental groups, trade unions and professional associations. More broadly, diplomats posted to Hong Kong by dozens of countries have spent long hours observing national-security trials, held without juries before panels of hand-picked judges. Dutifully, foreign envoys write reports on stage-managed “elections”. Some of those contests involve a single, pre-screened candidate—the only one to meet the requirement, imposed from Beijing after anti-government protests in 2019, that “patriots administer Hong Kong”. Continued here

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber. We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials. Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 433006120