Aurelia Butler

Around 78% of the 801 million birr withdrawn from cash machines or transferred during the night of March 15, or 622.9 million birr ($11 million), has been returned, the president of the bank Abie Sano said on Tuesday.The lender has published the names of the more than 500 people who are yet to return the balance, Abie said. He previously blamed university students for being largely responsible for the “theft”, accusing them of sharing news about the glitch via social media.The problem occurred during an update to the bank’s systems, Ethiopia’s central bank said earlier this month, adding that there was no risk to customers or the overall financial system.($1 = 56.6083 birr) More

While the overall global environment for financial risk remained challenging – and there were concerns about specific areas such as private equity – Britain’s financial system remained well protected against future shocks, the BoE said. “So far UK borrowers have been resilient to the impact of higher interest rates,” the BoE’s Financial Policy Committee said in a quarterly update.Last week the BoE kept its main interest rate at 5.25%, its highest in nearly 16 years, but said inflation was heading in the right direction for a rate cut. Financial markets on Tuesday saw a nearly two in three chance of a first quarter-point rate cut by June and a move is fully priced in by August.The BoE said just over half of households with mortgages had seen debt payments rise since it started raising rates in December 2021. Mortgage debt service ratios were forecast to rise from 7.0% in the third quarter of 2023 to 8.4% by the end of 2026, slightly below a projection of 8.8% in December.The proportion of households with high debt costs relative to their cost of living was seen rising marginally to 1.6% by the end of this year from 1.4%, well below the peak of 3.4% it reached after the global financial crisis.However, the BoE noted a rising trend of mortgages with 30-year terms – which now accounted for almost half of new mortgages – and that some very low-income households were struggling with basics such as food, even if they were not in debt that posed broader financial stability risks.Britain’s economy entered a shallow recession in the second half of 2023, although more recent business surveys and data suggest it has returned to growth and will eke out a very modest expansion in 2024.Corporate insolvencies in England and Wales in February were 17% higher than a year earlier and 50% above their level four years ago, just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck Britain.The BoE said the weakness was concentrated among very small businesses.”Corporates remained broadly resilient to high interest rates and weak growth,” it said. More

The institutes now forecast gross domestic product (GDP) to increase by 1.4% in 2025, revised from 1.5% previously.”Although a recovery is likely to set in from the spring, the overall momentum will not be too strong,” said Stefan Kooths, head of economic research at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW).Economic output was currently barely higher than before the pandemic, as productivity in Germany has been at a standstill since then, the institutes said in a report outlining their six-monthly joint economic forecasts. “There have recently been more headwinds than tailwinds in the domestic and foreign economies,” the report said. German exports declined despite rising global economic activity, primarily because demand for capital and intermediate goods, which are important for Germany, was weak and price competitiveness for energy-intensive goods suffered, they said.Uncertainty about economic policy was weighing on corporate investment, which was likely to remain at the 2017 level despite the expected upturn in the coming year, according to the economic experts.PRIVATE CONSUMPTION THE KEY DRIVERIn the current year, private consumption would become the most important driving force for the economy, followed by stronger exports in the coming year, the institutes said.Private consumption should benefit from lower inflation – German inflation was expected to ease to 2.3% in 2024 and 1.8% in 2025.A robust labour market would also support consumption, the institutes said. Unemployment was likely to rise only slightly and fall again starting from spring onwards. Over the course of the year, the unemployment rate was likely to be 5.8%, falling to 5.5% next year. In this resilient labour market, there was good news for wages – real wages would increase over the entire forecast period and make up for the losses from 2022 and the first half of 2023, the report said.However, the level seen at the end of 2021, before the drastic surge in inflation, was not expected to be reached until the second quarter of 2025.The economy ministry incorporates the joint forecasts from the institutes – Ifo, DIW, IWH, IfW and RWI – into its own predictions.In its latest forecast, the German government expects the economy to grow 0.2% this year, far less than a previously forecast 1.3%. More

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the More

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The catastrophic bridge collapse that closed the Port of Baltimore to ship traffic is unlikely to trigger a major new U.S. supply chain crisis or spike goods prices, due to ample and growing spare capacity at competing East Coast ports, economists and logistics experts say.With six people still missing after a container ship collision destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge, it remained unclear how long the span’s twisted superstructure would block the harbor’s mouth.But port officials from New York to Georgia were busy on Tuesday fielding queries from shippers about diverting Baltimore-bound cargo from containers to vehicles and bulk material. “We’re ready to help. We have ample capacity to absorb any surge in container traffic,” Port of Virginia spokesperson Joe Harris told Reuters. The Norfolk-based port is seen as a major beneficiary, due to its close proximity to Baltimore, but ports in Savannah and Brunswick (NYSE:BC), Georgia, also were poised to absorb some traffic, a spokesperson for the Georgia Ports Authority said.The situation is a marked shift from the clogged, understaffed ports and supply chain chaos of 2021 and 2022 that spiked prices and fueled inflation as Americans binged on imported goods purchases coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.East Coast ports have invested billions of dollars over the past decade to expand capacity and while the temporary closure at Baltimore may add time and cost for some companies, economists do not expect a significant macroeconomic impact.”The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland is another reminder of the U.S. vulnerability to supply-chain shocks, but this event will have greater economic implications for the Baltimore economy than nationally,” Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note.”We don’t anticipate that the disruptions to trade or transportation will be visible in U.S. GDP, and the implications for inflation are minimal,” he added.NO SHIPS, NO WORKThe impact on the Port of Baltimore’s more than 2,000 workers who load and unload cargo vessels could be significant if the closure lasts more than a few days. The dockworkers are day laborers, said Scott Cowan, head of the International Longshoreman’s Association Local 333 in Baltimore, meaning they only work when there is cargo to be moved. He estimated there might be about a week’s work clearing the existing inventory at the port. “After that,” he said, “we’re dead in the water” with a collective $2 million a day in lost wages at stake.The port directly generates over 15,000 jobs, with an additional 140,000 jobs dependent on port activity, according to Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s office. VEHICLE PORT One area of concern is higher shipment costs for imported cars and trucks and for exports of farm tractors and construction equipment as Baltimore is the largest U.S. port for “roll-on, roll-off” vehicle shipments, with over 750,000 cars and light trucks handled by state-owned terminals in 2023, according to Maryland Port Administration data.Ford Motor (NYSE:F) Co and General Motors (NYSE:GM) said they would reroute some affected shipments but the impact would be minimal, while Volkswagen (ETR:VOWG_p) is unaffected because its new Sparrows Point vehicles terminal is located at a former steel mill site on the bridge’s Chesapeake Bay side.The risk of car price spikes is further dampened by a recovery in automotive inventories to their highest level since May 2020, after being drawn down sharply during the pandemic. The industry’s inventory-to-sales ratio is near its 32-year-average of 1.96 to 1 according to Census Bureau data, and sales incentives have risen in recent months as high interest rates dampen demand.COASTAL SHIFTRyan Peterson, founder and CEO of logistics platform Flexport, said that with Baltimore handling only 1.1 million twenty-foot equivalent containers last year – ranking 12th in the U.S., any impact on container rates and shipping costs from the disruption would be far less than increases caused by cargoes diverted from the Suez Canal because of attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Houthi militant group in Yemen.But the port outage could contribute to a shift of container traffic to West Coast U.S. ports that was already underway over the past several months because of the lack Asian shippers’ access to the Suez route and reduced capacity in the Panama Canal due to low water levels. Peterson said the potential for an East Coast longshoreman strike in late September – at the height of Christmas-season imports – also has some shippers considering West Coast shipments. “East Coast volumes are down and there is the ability for those ports to flex up to handle this,” he said of the Baltimore disruption, adding that it’s “one more reason to think to start shifting volumes to the West Coast instead of the East.” More

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Central Bank’s monetary policy would remain “very restrictive” even after an interest rate cut, ECB board member Piero Cipollone said on Wednesday.”We’re so far away from a neutral stance of monetary policy that even if we adjust, we are still very restrictive,” Cipollone told an event in Brussels. More