Our Insights

Using a high-frequency dataset, CEIC users can get a real-time sense of consumers' waxing and waning confidence well ahead of the official figures - and insights into an economy that has been a bit more sluggish than expected in 2024.

With the threat of Donald Trump's tariffs hanging over the economy, the Bank of Canada cut interest rates by a half-point on Dec. 11. Officials likely saw room for this supportive move given that consumer prices are set to keep receding - an outlook that is backed up by CEIC's latest nowcast.

Will the Federal Reserve announce another rate cut on Dec. 18? Futures markets think so. A framework for the Fed's policy challenge can be found in the economist John Taylor's rough guideline for where the interest rate "should" be over the short term.

Even before Donald Trump returns to office, the US is moving to impose more tariffs. The Biden Administration views the solar industry as a critical sector, and the Commerce Department just slapped significant duties on exports from the ASEAN nations of Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Ecuador's economy has had a rough 2024, but one of the bright spots has been international demand for the nation's tropical crops and farmed seafood.

When it comes to exchange rates, fund flows continue to send strong predictive signals. Recently, international asset-allocation trends are pointing to a "Trump factor" that might weaken the Malaysian ringgit.

South Korea shocked the world when President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law for the first time since the country's transition to democracy in the 1980s. The incident lasted only six hours as legislators voted unanimously to overturn the declaration.

As we move into mid-December, the economic narrative for 2024 appears clear in retrospect: inflation was mostly tamed, and most central banks could start easing.

Predicting "transitory" inflation went wrong for some of the world's central bankers earlier this decade, but this might be a safer call for India -- where a spike in food prices is reversing itself in real time.

Latin America's economies are diverging lately. Unlike the positive trends seen in Brazil and Peru recently, Chilean growth is facing a few wobbles; a pickup in business bankruptcies is the latest data point.

China is the world's biggest iron-ore producer, and it imports most of this key steelmaking ingredient by sea. Once we consider how much iron ore is in the holds of vessels calling at Chinese ports, we can get an early sense of iron-ore imports – and a signal about the economy more broadly – by monitoring shipping traffic.

Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico made the headlines beyond North America; manufacturing imports from Mexico had long been in Trump's crosshairs, but in Canada, the president-elect is now calling out a major energy exporter whose free-trade deal with the US predated NAFTA.