Our Insights

Los Angeles is battling severe wildfires. As of Jan. 9, there was no containment in sight. There were at least five deaths and over 100,000 people were forced to evacuate as entire neighborhoods were wiped out.

UK asset prices are being rocked by the global bond selloff in real time, but the underlying British economy is decidedly stronger than the Bank of England expected a year ago.

Brazil's currency was one of the world's worst performers last year as President Lula's budget plans spooked markets. The sharpest declines came in December; the central bank was forced to make its largest ever intervention in the currency markets, using more than USD 30 billion of its international reserves.

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.