Economy

Biden’s administration has made multiple requests for more disaster aid since Congress last passed supplemental funding in December 2022, but lawmakers have not acted despite multiple storms including Hurricanes Helene and Milton, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young said.  Severe storms also have hit Alaska, Connecticut, Louisiana, New Mexico, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Illinois, she wrote in a memo.    “The Biden-Harris Administration stands ready to work with lawmakers to deliver the vital resources our communities need with strong bipartisan and bicameral support,” Young said, adding that disaster relief is not typically a partisan issue.Young did not say how much the administration would seek but noted the roughly $120 billion after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017, $90 billion in 2015 after Hurricane Katrina, and $50 billion after Hurricane Sandy in 2013.  She also noted that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who visited North Carolina last month in the wake of Hurricane Helene, had told reporters Congress would take bipartisan action to provide an “appropriate amount” of federal funds.Representatives for Johnson could not be immediately reached for comment on the request, which requires congressional approval. A new Republican-led Congress convenes in early January and Biden leaves office Jan. 20, handing over the White House to Republican Donald Trump.  Hurricane Milton came ashore on Oct. 9 and carved a swathe of destruction across Florida, including an estimated $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion in crops and agricultural infrastructure damage alone, among other losses.    Hurricane Helene had made landfall farther north just weeks earlier.     Analysts have said they expect up to $55 billion in insured losses from this year’s Hurricanes Helene and Milton. More

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – The Indian government is pushing back on two key proposals of the central bank, which will require banks to set aside more funds for infrastructure projects and hold more liquid assets against online deposits, according to a government source.Large parts of Asia’s third-largest economy rely on bank financing with lenders’ credit growing at nearly 14% over the past year. The Reserve Bank of India (NS:BOI) (RBI) in May proposed banks set aside 5% of the loans given to infrastructure projects that are under construction, pushing banks to approach the government on concerns over a rise in the cost of funding such projects.Separately, the central bank proposed in July that banks should provide an additional 5% ‘run-off’ on digitally accessible retail deposits to enable them to better manage risks from heavy withdrawals through internet or mobile banking. This would result in banks holding more liquid assets such as government bonds, reducing the funds available to lend to customers.Both the proposals have yet to take effect.The federal finance ministry’s banking department, on two different occasions, has written to the RBI asking the guidelines be diluted as they could “squeeze credit in the economy”, the government source said.For the proposed project finance guidelines, the banking department has suggested the RBI take a case-by-case approach towards different sectors for deciding the quantum of funds banks set aside, based on the sector’s risk profile, according to the source. The source did not want to be named as they are not authorised to speak to media. The finance ministry and RBI did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. High-risk projects in real estate sector can have a higher 5% provisioning limit, but solar and renewable energy projects should not be mandated to provide higher provisioning, the source said, adding the government has not suggested any ceiling for the percentage of funds needed to be set aside. The regulatory guidelines should strike a balance between credit needs of the economy and the health of the banking sector, the source said.For online deposits, the “run-off” should be mandated only for categories of deposits that may see heavy withdrawals, and not across the board, the source said. More

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) -Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies began arriving on Monday at Rio de Janeiro’s Modern Art Museum for their annual summit, bracing for a shift in the global order with the return to power of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva received the heads of government on a red carpet at the museum where they will meet through midday on Tuesday. Their discussions of trade, climate change and international security will run up against the sharp U.S. policy changes that Trump vows upon taking office in January, from tariffs to the promise of a negotiated solution to the war in Ukraine.While U.S President Joe Biden arrives as a lame duck with just two months remaining in the White House, China’s President Xi Jinping will be a central player at a G20 summit riven with geopolitical tensions amid the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.Diplomats drafting a joint statement for the summit’s leaders have struggled to hold together a fragile agreement on how to address the escalating Ukraine war, even a vague call for peace without criticism of any participants, sources said. A massive Russian air strike on Ukraine on Sunday shook what little consensus they had established, with European diplomats pushing to revisit previously agreed language on global conflicts. The United States has also lifted prior limits on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-made weapons to strike deep into Russia. Security in Rio de Janeiro has been strengthened with troops reinforcing police for the duration of the summit.A Brazilian army patrol came under gunfire near a Rio de Janeiro slum in the hours before the summit began, police said. No one was injured in the incident by the hillside Cidade de Deus community some 20 km (12 miles) west of the G20 venue. NEW WHITE HOUSE PRIORITIESBrazilian officials recognized that their agenda for the G20, focused on sustainable development, taxing the super-rich and fighting poverty and hunger could soon lose steam when Trump starts dictating new global priorities from the White House.Brazil’s push for a reform of global governance, including multilateral financial institutions, may also hit roadblocks with Trump, Brazilian officials said.Biden, who visited the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) rainforest on his way to Rio, is set to announce a pledge to replenish the World Bank’s International Development Association fund aimed at the world’s poorest countries, and launch a bilateral clean energy partnership with Brazil, a senior U.S. official told reporters.Xi is expected to tout China’s Belt & Road initiative as it exerts its economic ascendancy. Brazil has so far declined to join the global infrastructure initiative, but hopes are high for other industrial partnerships when Xi wraps up his stay in the country with a state visit in Brasilia on Wednesday.Brazil’s decision not to join was “a big blow to relations,” said Li Xing, professor at the Guangdong Institute of International Strategies, affiliated with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “China was very disappointed,” he said.Trade talks around the G20 will be stoked by concerns of an escalation in the U.S.-China trade war, as Trump plans to slap tariffs on imports from China and other nations.Trump’s tax-cutting verve will add to headwinds for Brazil’s efforts to discuss taxation of the super-rich, an issue dear to Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who put it on the G20 agenda.Trump’s newest ally in Latin America, libertarian Argentine President Javier Milei, has already drawn a red line on the issue. Argentina’s negotiators refused to approve mention of the issue in the summit’s joint communique, diplomats said. More

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s Finance Ministry slightly upgraded its economic growth forecast for this year to 3.3%, up from the 3.2% projected in September, while maintaining the 2.5% growth estimate for next year.Regarding inflation, the ministry’s economic policy secretariat raised its projections to 4.4% for this year, up from 4.25% previously, and 3.6% for next year, from an earlier estimate of 3.4%. More

KYIV (Reuters) – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine reaches its 1,000th day on Tuesday, a grim milestone in Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two.Devastating human and material losses continue to mount, leaving Ukraine more vulnerable than at any time since the early days of the war. Following is a summary of Ukraine’s losses since the invasion.HUMAN TOLLAs of Aug. 31, 2024 the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine had documented at least 11,743 civilians killed and 24,614 wounded in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.UN and Ukrainian officials say the actual figures are probably much higher, given the difficulty in verifying deaths and injuries, especially in areas such as the devastated port city of Mariupol that are now in Russian hands.Ukrainian prosecutors said 589 Ukrainian children had been killed by Nov. 14, 2024.Though civilians have suffered greatly, the vast majority of the dead are soldiers: a rare all-out conventional war fought by two comparably equipped modern armies has been extraordinarily bloody. Many thousands have perished in intense fighting across heavily fortified front lines under relentless artillery fire, with tanks, armoured vehicles and infantry mounting assaults on trenches.Both sides closely guard tallies of their own military losses as national security secrets, and public estimates by Western countries based on intelligence reports vary widely. But most estimate hundreds of thousands of wounded and dead on each side.Western countries believe Russia has suffered far worse casualties than Ukraine, sometimes losing more than 1,000 soldiers killed per day during periods of intense fighting in the east. But it is Ukraine, with around a third of Russia’s population, that is likely to be facing the more severe manpower shortages arising from battles of attrition.In a rare Ukrainian reference to its military death toll, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February, 2024 that 31,000 Ukrainian service members had been killed. He gave no figures on the number of injured or missing.Apart from the direct casualties, the war has raised mortality rates from all causes across Ukraine, caused the birth rate to collapse by about a third, sent more than 6 million Ukrainians fleeing abroad to Europe and displaced nearly 4 million inside the country. The United Nations estimated that Ukraine’s population had declined by 10 million, or around a quarter, since the start of the invasion.TERRITORYRussia now occupies and claims to have annexed around a fifth of Ukraine, an area around the size of Greece.Moscow’s forces initially stormed through northern, eastern and southern Ukraine in early 2022, reaching the outskirts of Kyiv in the north and crossing the Dnipro River in the south. Ukraine’s military pushed them back throughout the first year of the war, but Russia has still kept swathes of southern and eastern territory, added to land it and its proxies had already seized in 2014. Moscow has now captured nearly the whole of the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east, and the entire coast of the Sea of Azov in the south.Many cities in the frontline area that have been captured by Moscow have been destroyed, largest among them the Azov port of Mariupol, with a population before the war of around half a million. In the past year, Russia has slowly extended its grip in intense fighting, mainly in the Donbas. Ukraine, for its part, launched its first large-scale assault on Russian territory in August and has captured a sliver of western Russia’s Kursk region.DEVASTATED ECONOMYUkraine’s economy shrank by about a third in 2022. Despite growth in 2023 and so far this year, it is still only 78% of its size before the invasion, First Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko told Reuters.The latest available assessment by the World Bank, European Commission, United Nations and Ukrainian government found that direct war damage in Ukraine had reached $152 billion as of December, 2023, with housing, transport, commerce and industry, energy and agriculture the worst-affected sectors.The total cost of reconstruction and recovery was estimated by the World Bank and Ukrainian government at $486 billion as of the end of December last year. The figure is 2.8 times higher than Ukraine’s nominal gross domestic product in 2023, according to economy ministry data.Ukraine’s power sector has been particularly hard hit, with Russia regularly targeting infrastructure in long range attacks.Ukraine is one of the world’s main sources of grain, and the interruption of its exports early in the war worsened a global food crisis. Exports have since largely recovered with Ukraine finding ways to circumvent a de facto Russian blockade. Ukraine spends most state revenues funding defence, and relies on financial aid from Western partners to pay pensions, public sector wages and other social spending. Each day’s fighting costs Kyiv about $140 million, said Roksolana Pidlasa, the head of parliament’s budget committee.The draft 2025 budget envisages that about 26% of Ukraine’s GDP, or 2.2 trillion hryvnias ($53.3 billion), would go on defence. Ukraine has already received more than $100 billion from its Western partners in financial aid. More

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“At a time when we want industries to ramp up and build capacities, bank interest rates will have to be far more affordable,” the minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, said at an event in Mumbai.Last week, the nation’s trade minister said the Reserve Bank of India (NS:BOI) (RBI) should cut interest rates to boost economic growth and look through food prices while deciding on monetary policy.The comments came after a surge in retail inflation, largely driven by a jump in vegetable prices, dashed hopes of an interest rate cut by the RBI in December.”Inflation gets actually very, very volatile because of the supply demand constraints,” Sitharaman said, while refusing to weigh in on whether perishable items like food should be considered in the nation’s inflation targeting framework and while deciding on monetary policy.Earlier this year, India’s top economic advisor said India’s monetary policy framework should consider targeting inflation that excludes food, the prices of which are more influenced by supply than demand. The trade minister, Piyush Goyal, backed the suggestion. Persistently high food inflation has also squeezed middle class budgets, slowing urban spending in the past three to four months and threatening the country’s brisk economic growth. Sitharaman said there was no cause for undue concern and the government was committed to measures needed to ensure the Indian economy remains on course. More

In their recent note, the brokerage identifies the potential for widespread tariff increases as a major downside risk for international markets and economic growth. This concern is particularly acute in light of ongoing geopolitical tensions and the resurgence of protectionist policies across key economic blocs.Goldman Sachs warns that if implemented, broad-based tariffs—especially on key trade routes involving major economies like the U.S. and China—could disrupt supply chains and drive up costs for businesses and consumers alike. These developments may stifle global trade flows and weigh on corporate earnings, particularly in industries heavily reliant on international supply networks such as manufacturing and technology.In its 2025 economic forecast, Goldman Sachs projects steady growth for major economies, including 4.5% for China and 2.5% for the U.S. However, these projections are underpinned by the assumption that trade tensions do not escalate to the extent of introducing large-scale tariffs. The note says that any deviation from this assumption—such as the imposition of new trade barriers—could result in a downward revision of these growth forecasts.The brokerage also flags the broader market implications of increased tariffs, noting that equity markets could face additional valuation pressures. With risk asset prices already reflecting optimistic macroeconomic forecasts, the introduction of punitive trade measures could trigger heightened volatility and dampen investor sentiment globally. More