Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday reiterated a message he has sounded in recent weeks: While the Fed expects to cut interest rates this year, it won’t be ready to do so until it sees “more good inflation readings” and is more confident that annual price increases are falling toward its 2 per cent … Read more
China left benchmark lending rates unchanged at a monthly fixing on Wednesday, in line with market expectations, after the central bank kept a key policy rate steady last week amid some signs of improvement in the broad economy. WHY IT’S IMPORTANT China has set an economic growth target of “around 5%” for 2024, a rate … Read more
Gagan Banga, VC & MD, Indiabulls Housing Finance, says: “We have now reached a stage where over the last four to six quarters, we stabilised the overall business, scaled up the retail disbursals and whatever are the targeted segments for growth, the disbursals around that are coming along at a good pace. At this point … Read more
New Delhi: The country’s car industry has for the second time revised upwards its growth projections for this fiscal to more than 8%, nearly twice the rate projected at the start of the year. Passenger vehicle sales in the local market are expected to grow by 8.1-8.2% to 4.23 million units in FY24, buoyed by … Read more
“This pent-up demand will fade, so demand will return to the average level seen during the years before the pandemic. It is unlikely to go back to a peak of HK$72.7 billion seen in 2016.” Last year’s tally is a significant jump on the three-year Covid-19 period, which recorded sales of HK$2.1 billion in 2022, … Read more
The attractiveness of the Indian markets is far from ebbing out. In the beginning of 2024 itself, there is another favourable development regarding the Indian markets. Bloomberg proposed to include India FAR (fully accessible route) government securities in the Bloomberg EM Local Currency Index. Quite naturally, this will ensure flows into the Indian markets. Capital … Read more
Mumbai: Gold should remain a key component of investor portfolios in 2024 to help mitigate the volatility expected in equities and fixed income amid crucial local and global events, said experts. While an easing interest rate environment is seen propping up prices of the yellow metal, double-digit returns like those in 2022 and 2023 are … Read more
Mumbai: Bond forwards in sovereign debt, for which the Reserve Bank of India released draft directions last week, will help end a regulatory grey area and let banks and insurers cater to the trillions of rupees worth of retail demand for long-term investment products in a standardised manner. Introduction of bond forwards, which are derivative … Read more
Washington: The Federal Reserve kept its key interest rate unchanged Wednesday for a third straight time, a sign that it is likely done raising rates after having imposed the fastest string of increases in four decades to fight painfully high inflation. The Fed’s policymakers also signaled that they expect to make three quarter-point cuts to … Read more
