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Macro Analysis

Macro Focus: Unveiling China’s macro dilemmas and policy choices

China’s 2020 stimulus was modest. The country’s leadership learned the lessons of the 2009 giga stimulus and the imbalances that stemmed from it. More importantly, we show in this piece that the focus has shifted from credit control/guidance – both traditional and non conventional – to other policy instruments. The main candidate for these new policy instruments is fiscal policy. This should translate into a continuation of the substitution of private debt by government debt going forward.

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Economy ENG Eurozone Macro Analysis

Macro Focus: Economic impact of Lockdowns 2.0

In order to contain the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, most European countries have implemented new lock-downs starting from Mid-October.  As the Chart of the Week with data extracted from Google Mobility shows, the new “soft lockdowns” were overall significantly softer than the “hard lockdowns” implemented to contain the first wave of the pandemic, earlier this year in […]

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Business & Geopolitics Business Intelligence ENG

The US 2020 Presidential election (2/3): Joe Biden’s Climate Plan

Biden’s plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice is a watered down and more realistic version of the Green New Deal championed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). It aims to reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050, which would put US environmental ambitions on par with the latest Green Deal proposal put forward by the European Commission, through a legislative enforcement mechanism in 2021 that would achieve legally-binding emissions reductions. We analyze the general philosophy, the technical measures and the potential impact of this plan.

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ENG Macro Analysis

Macro Focus: Impact of COVID-19 on E-Commerce sales

The Census Bureau of the US Department of Commerce announced on August 18 that U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the second quarter of 2020, adjusted for seasonal variation, was $211.5 billion, an increase of 31.8 percent from the first quarter of 2020.

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Economy ENG Other G20 / Global

The long view: Apocalypse now? The outlook for the global economy after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Willl the Covid-19 reshape the global economy? What are the most important hotspots and the blindspots revealed by this crisis? We tackle this issue in this article. Beyond the handling of the health crisis and the exceptional support measures designed to ensure that hundreds of millions or even billions of people around the world do not lose their livelihoods overnight, the most worrying concern are the medium- and long-term consequences of the crisis for the global economy.