Aurelia Butler

Brazil’s Foreign Ministry said it hopes the talks will lead to a friendly resolution to what it called “discriminatory sanitary controls for the detection of salmonella” that create “unjustified barriers” to international trade. The request, which is the first formal step in a dispute at the WTO, was circulated to its members on Thursday,Brazil claims the application by the EU of salmonella food safety criteria on poultry meat violates the rules of the WTO’s Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures.”Brazil considers that there is no technical or scientific evidence to justify the application, by the European Union, of stricter microbiological criteria for the detection of salmonella in salted chicken meat and turkey with pepper, in comparison to fresh poultry meat,” Brazil’s statement said. More

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – Governments around the world need to look at unified approaches to managing COVID-19, the Group Chief Executive of Malaysian budget airline AirAsia Group Bhd Tony Fernandes said at the APEC CEO Summit.Fernandes said leaders in the Asia-Pacific region were being “over-sensitive” with COVID-19 and needed to be braver and more standardised in dealing with the pandemic. More

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -The Bank of Mexico raised its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points for the fourth straight policy meeting on Thursday, taking it to 5.00%, in a 4-to-1 vote by its governing board, as markets looked forward to more hikes down the pike.The decision was in line with a Reuters poll of analysts and comes as annual inflation accelerated to 6.24% in the year through October, more than double the central bank’s target of 3%, plus or minus one percentage point.”The shocks that have increased inflation are largely considered to be transitory. Nevertheless, the horizon in which they could affect it is unknown, and they have involved a wide range of products, while being of considerable magnitude,” the central bank said in its policy statement.This poses greater risks to the price formation process and inflation expectations, said Banxico, as the bank is known.William Jackson, chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, said Banxico would likely continue to hike the benchmark rate in 25 basis points increments, with the bank’s tightening cycle ending with the rate at 6.00%.”There’s little evidence that Banxico’s board has the appetite to increase the pace of tightening, as other central banks in Latin America have done,” said Jackson.Brazil’s central bank considered an even larger interest rate increase before making a 150-basis-point hike in late October, minutes from its last policy meeting showed, underscoring an aggressive response to double-digit inflation.On growth, Banxico noted preliminary data showed the Mexican economy contracted during the third quarter, but that it should resume its recovery in the fourth quarter.”An environment of uncertainty persists and slack conditions are anticipated, with significant differences across sectors,” the Mexican central bank said.At upcoming monetary policy meetings, Banxico said its five-member board would closely assess the behavior of inflationary pressures and all factors that influenced “the foreseen trajectory for inflation and its expectations.”Banxico forecast average annual inflation of 6.8% for the fourth quarter, above a prior forecast of 6.2%, while the core index, which strips out some volatile items, is seen averaging 5.5% over the same period, versus a prior view of 5.3%. More

“We are still in a territory where the Swiss franc is high,” Maechler told an event in Geneva. “More generally, how is it (the franc) going to go further? I don’t know. I don’t know where the Swiss franc is going to go.””The reality is, we continue to have a safe-haven currency,” Maechler said. “Uncertainties remain high, largely because of the COVID crisis which continues to be there.”Maechler repeated the SNB’s commitment to currency market interventions to check the rise of the franc, which recently hit its highest level against the euro since May 2020.Modest Swiss inflation, which has risen to around 1.2%, helped take the edge off the franc’s rise and reduce the damaging effect the currency’s strength has on Switzerland’s export-orientated economy, she said.”You’ve seen recently there has been quite an appreciation of the Swiss franc,” Maechler said. “Now if you look at the real exchange rate, it’s still higher than 2015,. “It is something that we do continue to monitor, and we will continue to do so.”The SNB remained committed to forex market purchases where appropriate, seeking to have the maximum impact with the minimum intervention, she said.On its investments it bought with foreign currencies however, the SNB sought to have the minimum market impact, Maechler added. More

With Washington closely monitoring a buildup of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border, U.S. officials have briefed EU counterparts on their concerns over a possible military operation, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.The assessments are believed to be based on information the U.S. hasn’t yet shared with European governments, which would have to happen before any decision is made on a collective response, the people said. They’re backed up by publicly-available evidence, according to officials familiar with the administration’s thinking. Russia says military deployments on its territory are an internal matter and it denies any aggressive intentions, while accusing the U.S. of provocation by sailing warships in the Black Sea close to its territory this week. The ruble weakened on the news, falling 0.5% against the dollar to a six-day low. Similar tensions erupted in the spring when the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization accused Russia of massing as many as 100,000 troops, tanks and warplanes near the border with Ukraine. The crisis eased after U.S. President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin and offered a summit that took place in June.White House officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Russia’s latest movement of troops and tanks toward Ukraine spurred CIA Director Bill Burns to visit Moscow this month, where he spoke by phone with Putin. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also asked Putin in a call Wednesday to use his influence with Russia’s ally Belarus to defuse a crisis over thousands of Middle East migrants seeking to cross the border with Poland into the EU. Putin declined.Why Turmoil in Belarus Is Spilling Over Its Borders: QuickTakeMerkel and Putin spoke again on Thursday about Ukraine and Belarus, the Kremlin said in a statement. The Russian leader criticized Ukraine’s alleged use of combat drones in violation of a previous agreement and American military activity in the Black Sea, according to the statement. The U.S. warning over Ukraine comes on top of the more recent standoff between Poland and Belarus, a close Russian ally. And it is playing out amid uncertainty over increased Russian gas supplies to Europe despite Putin’s pledge to ramp up deliveries from this week to ease an energy crunch. He’s pushing for European regulators to give swift approval to operate the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, a project the U.S. and Ukraine opposed as a security risk.Russia doesn’t intend to start a war with Ukraine now, though Moscow should show it’s ready to use force if necessary, one person close to the Kremlin said. An offensive is unlikely as Russian troops would face public resistance in Kyiv and other cities, but there is a plan to respond to provocations from Ukraine, another official said. With the West preparing fresh sanctions against Belarus over what it sees as a manufactured migration crisis, President Alexander Lukashenko threatened Thursday to shut down a key pipeline carrying Russian gas to the EU if Poland closes their border. “I would recommend the leadership of Poland, Lithuanians and other empty-headed people to think before speaking,” he said.How Europe Has Become So Dependent on Putin for Gas: QuickTakeU.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and French President Emmanuel Macron discussed Ukraine extensively during talks in Paris Wednesday, a U.S. official said. Belarus is part of the same security context, the official said. Russia has orchestrated the migrant crisis between Belarus and Poland and the Baltic states — Lithuania and Latvia share a border with Belarus — to try to destabilize the region, two U.S. administration officials said. U.S. concerns about Russian intentions are based on accumulated evidence and trends that carry echoes of the run-up to Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, another administration official said. Russian officials rejected the accusations. “Russia has nothing to do with what is happening at the border of Belarus and Poland,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call Thursday. Moscow’s IntentionsWhile U.S. and Russian general staffs are in constant contact, the presence of American navy vessels in the Black Sea close to Russia is “absolutely” a matter of concern for Putin, Peskov added.The information U.S. officials shared on Russia at the recent meetings in Brussels was unsettling, said one of the people familiar. Another person emphasized that there’s no way of knowing Moscow’s true intentions, and what its next move might be or when.Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday in Washington, appeared to suggest the U.S. had shared at least some new information with him. “What we heard and saw today in Washington, D.C. corresponds to our own findings and analysis, adds some new elements which allows us to get a better, more comprehensive picture,” Kuleba said at a joint news conference with Blinken. The situation in Belarus is a “potential frontline” and shouldn’t be underestimated, he said.Why Russia-Ukraine Tensions Are So Hard to Defuse: QuickTakeThe U.S. doesn’t “have clarity over Moscow’s intentions” toward Ukraine, Blinken told reporters. “Our concern is that Russia may make the serious mistake of attempting to rehash what it undertook in 2014.”Ukraine and Russia have been in conflict since Putin responded to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that ousted the pro-Moscow president by seizing Crimea. Russia also backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in a war that has killed more than 13,000 people.The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors the situation under a 2015 agreement, said Wednesday that its mission witnessed the most cease-fire violations since July 2020 during the last week of October.According to defense-intelligence firm Janes, the recent Russian deployment has been covert, often taking place at night and carried out by elite ground units, in contrast to the fairly open buildup in the spring.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who was also in Washington on Wednesday, said that she and Biden discussed Ukraine and their full support for its territorial integrity. Ukraine has declared its ambition to join the EU and NATO, to Moscow’s fury. While Kremlin officials often boast privately that Russian forces could quickly reach Kyiv, it would be much more difficult to maintain control of a country of 44 million amid international condemnation. Putin warned rival nations in April that “they will regret it more than they’ve regretted anything in a long time” if they cross Russia’s “red line” on security. The deputy speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, Pyotr Tolstoy, declared that “all of Ukraine will be part of Russia and there won’t be any Ukraine” in a debate broadcast on Russia’s NTV last month. “I hope now the whole world clearly sees who really wants peace and who is concentrating almost 100,000 troops on our border,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an address to the nation late Wednesday. “Psychological pressure from Russia doesn’t have an impact on us, our intelligence has all the information, our army is ready to repel anytime and anywhere.”(Adds ruble weakening in fifth paragraph.)©2021 Bloomberg L.P. More

Here is a simple question. Has the UK economy already recovered all of the ground lost during coronavirus, or is the damage wrought by Covid-19 so severe that it will take another two years of normal growth rates to return activity to its pre-pandemic level? It may come as a surprise that the official answer, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, is that both statements are true. Measured by the value of goods and services produced, the real level of UK output was only 0.6 per cent below the pre-pandemic level in September and, by now, will almost certainly have reached that benchmark. But on another official statistic, the shortfall is still 3.3 per cent, roughly the equivalent of two years of recent UK average growth rates.For most people, this is the moment when you throw your arms up into the air and scream that economics never gives a straightforward answer. Policymakers, such as those at the Bank of England, tend to dust down their treasured weasel words for such situations and term the outlook to be “unusually uncertain”. Generally, they also seek to avoid changing policy when the present, let alone the future, is so uncertain. But this is not the moment to give up and go home. After a careful analysis of the UK’s national accounts and those of other countries, consistent stories do emerge from the mist with pretty clear policy prescriptions. Going back to first principles, we should not be surprised that data discrepancies such as these exist. One of the first things people learn on macroeconomics courses is that there are three ways to measure the size of an economy and its growth rate. Statisticians can measure the output of goods and services produced, they can assess the expenditure required to purchase this output and they can quantify the income received in the form of wages and profits by those supplying the goods and services. All three, by definition, are equal, but measurement error will normally create small differences between them in practice. The problem at the moment in the UK is that the discrepancies are huge. Measured by output, the UK’s coronavirus recovery in real terms is close to its European peers in the G7 but behind the US. Performance looks worse when the expenditure or income measures are used, with the UK economy trailing the G7 pack. None of this is quite the picture Rishi Sunak presents, of course. The chancellor likes to boast “we’re forecast to have the fastest growth in the G7 this year”, conveniently forgetting that 2021 covers only part of the pandemic.Looking at the national accounts in real terms is not sufficient for a full reading of the economy, however, because adjusting expenditure, income and the value of output for inflation has been particularly difficult for statisticians during the pandemic. It is generally easier to measure the cash value of transactions, so nominal comparisons are crucial and probably more accurate. Where data exist, these show the UK’s performance to be stronger internationally on all methods of measuring the economy. Whether it is nominal output, income or expenditure, the money flowing around the UK economy is already well above pre-pandemic levels and reasonably close to that of the US. With figures for the nominal growth of the economy and estimates of the real change in the volume of goods and services produced, the implied domestic inflation rate since the end of 2019 is just above six per cent. That is the one part of the national accounts that really is top of the G7 league table.Despite the data difficulties, there is then a truth visible in the mist surrounding the UK economy. It has probably performed worse than its peers, and it has almost certainly generated more domestic inflation. This is an economy that no longer needs emergency levels of [email protected] More

LONDON (Reuters) -Women who work mostly from home risk seeing their careers suffer now that significant numbers of workers are returning to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic, Bank of England policymaker Catherine Mann said on Thursday.Mann, a member of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, said online communication was unable to replicate the spontaneous office conversations which were important for recognition and advancement in many workplaces.”Virtual platforms are way better than they than they were even five years ago. But the extemporaneous, spontaneity – those are hard to replicate in a virtual setting,” she told an event for women in finance hosted by the newspaper Financial News.Difficulty accessing childcare and COVID-related disruption to schooling meant many women were continuing to work from home, while men returned to the office, Mann said.”There is the potential for two tracks. There’s the people who are on the virtual track and people who are on a physical track. And I do worry that we will see those two tracks develop, and we will pretty much know who’s going to be on which track, unfortunately,” she said.Mann was an economics professor and chief economist at Citi and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), before joining the BoE in September.British finance minister Rishi Sunak warned younger workers in August that they risked missing out on building skills and work relationships if they worked from home.British businesses last month said 60% of their staff were fully back at their normal place of work, but proportions vary widely by sector. In professional services, 34% of staff are in the office, 24% are fully working from home, and 35% are doing a mix, according to the Office for National Statistics.Separate ONS data shows a slightly higher percentage of male workers than females worked from home for at least some of the time in late October, although the gap was within the survey’s margin of error.Previous ONS analysis showed women were more likely than men to say working from home allowed them more time to work, with fewer distractions. But men said working from home helped them come up with new ideas, while women found it a hindrance. More