In the sweltering summer of AD18, a desperate chant echoed across China’s sun-scorched plains: “Heaven has gone blind!” Thousands of starving farmers, their faces smeared with ox blood, marched toward the opulent vaults held by the Han dynasty’s elite rulers.
Not just a British icon – a WHSmith outlet in an airport in Doha, Qatar. TY Lim/ShutterstockAfter 124 years as a familiar fixture to generations of customers, there will no longer be a place for WH Smith on UK high streets.
The Bank's Court of Directors acts as a unitary board, setting the organisation's strategy and budget and taking key decisions on resourcing and appointments. Required to meet a minimum seven times per year, it has five executive members from the Bank and up to nine non-executive members.
This paper investigates the role of mortgage refinancing in shaping the estimates of marginal propensity to consume (MPC) and its implications for fiscal policy. Using U.S. household data, we find that MPCs decrease during the year of mortgage refinancing and stabilize afterwards, particularly among households with lower liquid assets, higher debtto-income ratios, and valuable illiquid assets. The empirical evidence suggests that refinancing provides extra liquidity, reducing MPCs.
After springing an Easter surprise in the form of a support and investment package, PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis responded to rumours of snap elections by stressing that intends to stay the course in government and lead the battle for a third term. Officials are already outlining the next round of relief measures aimed at middle earners.
Recent months have seen a dramatic shift in US policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These changes carry deep economic consequences. President Donald Trump’s executive orders aim to ban DEI initiatives in federal agencies and contractors, and private companies have felt pressure to weaken or drop their DEI programmes. Trump has framed what was once a corporate safeguard against discrimination as “illegal and immoral”, marking a stark reversal in legal and business norms.
The IMF released this week the latest macro and fiscal outlook in the context of the spring meetings. Its observations on Greece were in line with those in the recent Article IV consultations.
President Trump has said his punishing tariffs would force companies to build factories in the United States. But it is far from clear that they will have the effects he predicted.
The president’s threats of tariffs have brought countries like Japan, South Korea and India rushing to negotiate, but they have sown chaos with bigger trading partners like China.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued in a speech that the multilateral economic institutions have veered away from their missions.
