Federal Reserve (Fed) officials talked about asset purchase tapering at their most recent meeting, but few seemed in a hurry to get the process going, according to the minutes released on Wednesday.
The Federal Open Market Committee’s June 15-16 meeting summary provided only a few new glimpses into talks about when the central bank should begin reducing the pace of its bond purchases.
Some members indicated that the economic recovery was proceeding faster than expected and was being accompanied by an outsized rise in inflation, both making the case for taking the Fed’s foot off the policy pedal. However, the prevailing mindset was that there should be no rush and markets must be well prepared for any policy shifts.
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Poverty in Germany: Two-million people too poor to heat their homes
On February 15, as temperatures plunged well below zero, snow and frost covered large parts of Europe and the homeless froze to death on the streets, the German Federal Statistics Office reported that more than 2 million people in Germany were freezing in their homes because they were too poor to heat them.
The figures refer to 2019, when 2.5 percent of the population was afflicted by this problem. The proportion was particularly high among those living in single-person households, at 4.8 percent, and among single parents and their children, at 7 percent. The risk of falling seriously ill or even freezing to death in such conditions is very high.
Economic sentiment in Germany has “increased again considerably,” as the ZEW economic sentiment index notched 9.4 points from the previous month to 71.2 points in February, according to the monthly survey among financial experts published by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) on Tuesday.
“The financial market experts are optimistic about the future,” said ZEW president Achim Wambach in a statement, adding that the experts were “confident that the German economy will be back on the growth track within the next six months”. Consumption in Germany and retail trade in particular are expected to “recover significantly, accompanied by higher inflation expectations,” Wambach said. However, the current economic situation in Germany has “worsened slightly” and declined by 0.8 points compared to the previous month to minus 67.2 points, according to the ZEW index.
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