Merryn Somerset Webb is the editor of MoneyWeek. In 1998, Merryn became a financial writer for The Week. In 2000, when MoneyWeek was launched, she became editor. Merryn has recently published a book on personal finance for women, Love is Not Enough: The Smart Woman's Guide to Making (and Keeping) Money.
“Brazil is the country of the future – and always will be,” goes the old joke. Previous periods of strong growth in Brazil have ended in turmoil, but the country has come a long way over the last few years and finally seems set to fulfil its potential and develop into an advanced economy.
Amidst all the furore regarding the Labour administration’s embarrassingly mis-managed tax shortcomings, the cries of those in the UK warning of a growing humanitarian crisis in the developing world have been lost.
This is the biggest IT services deal ever, said Gartner analyst Ben Pring. Computer-and-printer giant Hewlett Packard is buying EDS, which manages other firms’ computer systems and tasks such as order processing, for $14bn.
There is apparently a “great private banking myth” out there.
Inflation finally appears to be making a comeback in Japan. Excluding food, it rose to an annual rate of 1.2% in March, a ten-year high, while consumer prices excluding food and energy rose by 0.1% year-on-year, the first positive number since 1998.
It’s not just the credit crisis that has been keeping policymakers awake at night. A food crisis is sweeping the world like “a silent tsunami”, as Josette Sheeran of the World Food programme puts it, leaving widespread riots and rattled governments in its wake.
Not too long ago, some analysts were still claiming that turmoil in the financial markets would have scant impact on the real economy. But the “after-shock” of credit market ructions, as Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley put it, is now clearly kicking in.
The world could be “one crop failure away from an actual food crisis”, said George Wehrfritz and Jason Overdorf in Newsweek. Driven partly by speculation, the per-ton cost of rice, wheat and corn has surged 50% or more since mid-2007; Thai white rice prices are up 40% since the start of the year and world rice stockpiles are at their lowest levels since the 1980s.
What happened to Asian decoupling? Wasn’t Asia – thanks largely to fast-growing heavyweights China and India – supposed to shrug off the financial crisis and economic slowdown in the US?