Our Insights

Donald Trump is rewriting the rules of international trade in his second term. Shortly after taking office, his administration introduced sweeping tariffs - 25% on Canada and Mexico, 10% on Chinese imports and 25% on aluminum and steel. The latest tariff plan is 25% on imports of all foreign-made cars.

Amid daily news surprises from Trump's Washington, we can expect more volatility in economic data. This week, we're visualizing US gross domestic product revisions to demonstrate the use case for CEIC's market-leading Point-in-Time (PiT) datasets.

President Prabowo Subianto took the reins of ASEAN's largest economy late last year. His populist spending measures – including the expansion of a free-meal program – are coming at the expense of infrastructure investment. As our first chart shows, the annualized growth rate for government capital spending immediately decelerated -- reaching the slowest pace in a year and a half.

On March 6, the European Central Bank is widely expected to cut interest rates for the sixth time this cycle. CEIC's proprietary nowcast suggests that policy makers might feel comfortable making this move because inflation has stopped accelerating. (We'll find out for sure when price data is released on March 3.)

The surprisingly tight US labor market of recent years has finally met its match: Elon Musk. The mass government layoffs and federal hiring freeze Musk initiated in his capacity as Donald Trump's adviser are being reflected in high-frequency data tracked by CEIC.

Are you a portfolio strategist or Investment manager interested in some of the world’s fastest-growing markets – and how they might be affected by US tariffs?

We invite you to download our ASEAN chart pack, which examines Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

In the Philippines, inflation has typically been somewhat higher than the rest of the ASEAN-6; price increases are mostly driven by food – which is often imported – and accounts for almost a third of the consumer price index (CPI). In that context, CEIC's proprietary Daily Food Price Index is showing promising trends.

CEIC continues to watch Donald Trump's tariff plans for America's former NAFTA partners as his temporary exemption for Mexico (and Canada) expires at the end of this month. Some 83% of Mexico's exports go to the US. To identify the regions most at risk, we are revisiting one of our recently added datasets for Mexico, which offers granular, quarterly data by category and state.

For quite a long time, the Reserve Bank of Australia had been one of the world's more hawkish central banks. It remained concerned about stubborn inflation even as global counterparts started their pivot to easing.

A new range of data added to the CEIC platform takes a deeper dive into China's construction and real-estate industries. We charted the rate of change for real-estate investment against the equivalent figure for construction output (which also includes non-residential construction and other engineering projects).

Malaysia's overall economic good-news story has yet to trickle down into broad-based income growth for workers.

Some regions stand out for strong wages -- like Penang, home to a tech-driven "friendshoring" investment boom.

China's New Year (also known as the Spring Festival) is the nation's most important holiday. It's also a key moment for the economy; as people travel to reunite with family, we can gather key data points on travel, leisure spending and more. A year ago, we wrote that domestic mobility during the Spring Festival was sending encouraging signals about post-pandemic consumer confidence.