Aurelia Butler

Adrian Armas, head of the bank’s economic studies unit, said in a call that growth for 2022 was not now expected to reach the 3% figure forecast as recently as November.Protests erupted after the impeachment of former leftist President Pedro Castillo, who tried on Dec. 7 to illegally dissolve Congress, with demonstrators demanding President Dina Boluarte’s resignation. The death toll reached over 40 this week.Armas added in a call that inflationary pressures have continued into January.”What we are seeing is that unfortunately the pressures on perishable food continue,” Armas said.”Certainly the (unrest) problems we have in the south are generating significant price increases,” he added, explaining that supply chains has been hindered by “multiple” road blocks.Inflation in Peru closed 2022 at 8.46%. More

(Reuters) -Resurgent risk appetite among some investors is fueling rallies in the shares of so-called meme stocks this month after a crushing year for equities, though many analysts are skeptical the most recent moves will last.The volatility often associated with meme stocks has been on display this week. Shares of Bed Bath & Beyond (NASDAQ:BBBY), which had soared earlier in the week, fell more than 30% on Friday. The New York Times reported that the company is in talks with private equity firm Sycamore Partners for the sale of its assets as part of a possible bankruptcy process.The company’s shares are still up 45% this month, after hitting a three-decade low last week when the retailer warned it could seek bankruptcy protection. Carvana Co (NYSE:CVNA) shares, meanwhile, are up nearly 50% this month amid heavy short interest, despite reversing some of those gains on Friday. Shares of older meme stocks have joined in the rally, with GameStop Corp (NYSE:GME) up 11% and AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) Holdings Inc up around 24%. A 1,600% rise in shares of GameStop in early 2021 first put the spotlight on meme stocks and the retail investors that helped drive many of their rallies as they coordinated in forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets. Though many of those initial rallies have since sputtered, meme stocks have seen a number of short-lived rebounds since then, often coinciding with resurging risk appetite in broader markets.Signs of easing inflation that some investors believe may push the Federal Reserve to end its rate increases sooner than projected appear to be contributing to the latest moves in meme stocks while also helping push up the S&P 500, which is up 3.5% this year. The index fell more than 19% in 2022. “When we get a little bit of easing in inflation expectations … risk appetite comes back on and retail investors tend to pile into [meme stocks] in hopes of this lottery-like payoff,” said Garrett DeSimone, head of quantitative research at OptionMetrics. Meanwhile, the Cboe Volatility Index, known as Wall Street’s fear gauge because it reflects demand for downside protection, was recently at 18.3, near its lowest level since Jan ’22.”The rally in risk assets has carried meme stocks in its wake,” said Jason Benowitz, senior portfolio manager at CI Roosevelt.Also, “investors who sold for tax reasons in late 2022 might be reinvesting in early 2023,” he said.Analysts at Vanda (NASDAQ:VNDA) Research noted that January and February tend to be among the strongest months for retail inflows.“Moreover, retail investors tend to rev up their purchases heading into the earnings reporting season, as heightened volatility presents more opportunities for attractive returns,” Vanda’s analysts wrote.Market participants are quick to warn that similar rallies in meme stocks – as well as broader markets – have crumbled in the last year. GameStop shares are down more than 75% from their peak, while Bed Bath & Beyond shares, which surged to above $20 last year, quickly reversed those gains. A number of bounces in the S&P 500 last year also crumbled.Despite the renewed buying from retail investors, “the hurdle to reach previous net-flow highs looks difficult, and any meme stock mania is poised to be short-lived, in our view,” Vanda analysts wrote. More

Beijing has been taking ‘golden shares’ in private online media and content companies for more than five years, and in recent years expanding such arrangements to companies with vast troves of data.The stakes taken over the last four months in the Alibaba units are the first ones to come to light for the e-commerce firm. Alibaba has been one of the most prominent targets of China’s two-year-long regulatory crackdown on tech giants.These golden shares, typically equal to about 1% of a firm, are bought by government-backed funds or companies which gain board representation and/or veto rights for key business decisions.Public business registration records showed that in September last year an investment vehicle of state-owned Zhejiang Media Group took a 1% stake in Alibaba’s Youku Film and Television unit, which is based in Shanghai.Zhejiang Media Group has also appointed Jin Jun, the general manager of one of its subsidiaries, to the board of the Alibaba unit, the records showed. Separate business registration records showed that in December WangTouSuiCheng (Beijing), an entity under the China Internet Investment Fund (CIIF) set up by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), acquired a 1% stake in Alibaba unit Guangzhou Lujiao, whose main focus is “research and experimentation”. The Financial Times, which first reported the WangTouSuiCheng investment on Friday, said the goal of the investment is for Beijing to tighten control over content at the e-commerce giant’s streaming video unit Youku and web browser UCWeb. Alibaba didn’t respond to a request to comment.The FT also reported, citing unidentified sources, that discussions was under way for the government to take golden shares in gaming giant Tencent Holdings (OTC:TCEHY) which would involve a stake in one of the group’s main subsidiaries. Tencent declined to comment. Other firms that have such golden share arrangements include Full Truck Alliance Co, as well as mainland subsidiaries of TikTok owner ByteDance, Kuaishou Technology and Weibo (NASDAQ:WB), Reuters previously reported.Having such golden shares can be helpful to firms when they try to secure licences to disseminate online news and to show online visual and audio programmes, sources have told Reuters. More

“We need a strong European response,” the Commission’s Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a letter addressed to member states and seen by Reuters.The 27-country bloc fears that Washington’s $430 billion (400 billion euros) Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) with its generous tax breaks may lure away EU businesses and disadvantage European companies, from car manufacturers to makers of green technology.In December, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU would adapt its state aid rules to prevent an exodus of investment triggered by the U.S. package.Vestager said the Commission had already done a lot and approved 672 billion euros ($728 billion) of state aid under a crisis mechanism adopted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.More than two-thirds of the money had been notified to the EU by Germany (53%) and France (24%), she stated, followed by Italy with over 7%.In her letter, Vestager suggested changes to the existing crisis mechanism, such as making the calculation of the aid amount easier and the approval faster.”I am proposing to enlarge the scope of the existing simplified provisions to cover all renewable energy technologies, and to provide simpler options to member states to quantify how much aid they can grant to each project,” she wrote. Vestager also recommended creating the possibility for an anti-relocation aid for green investments in strategic sectors.”I envisage dedicated provisions to support new investments in production facilities, including via tax breaks,” she wrote in her letter.”These new provisions aim to counter the risk that investments might be unfairly diverted to third countries outside Europe.” This aid should be limited in time, targeted to those sectors where such risk really exists, and proportionate in terms of aid amounts, Vestager added.(1 euro = $1.0827 / $1 = 0.9233 euros) More