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Euro zone inflation, April 2025

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Shoppers buy fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs at an outdoor produce market under green-striped canopies in Regensburg, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria, Germany, on April 19, 2025.

Michael Nguyen/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Euro zone inflation was unchanged at 2.2% in April, missing expectations for a move lower, flash data from statistics agency Eurostat showed Friday.

Economists polled by Reuters had been expecting the reading to come in at 2.1% in April compared to March’s 2.2% as inflation has been easing back towards the European Central Bank’s 2% target.

Core inflation, which excludes more volatile food, energy, alcohol and tobacco prices, accelerated to 2.7% from March’s 2.4%. The closely-watched services inflation print also picked up again, coming in at 3.9% compared to the previous 3.5% reading.

The increase in services inflation was likely “driven mainly by Easter timing effects,” Franziska Palmas, senior Europe economist at Capital Economics, said in a note. These effects would reverse in the coming month, she added, suggesting that this left the door open for further interest rate cuts from the European Central Bank.

“We think the services rate will decline significantly in the rest of this year as US tariffs weigh on activity and the labour market continues to weaken,” Palmas added.

ECB President Christine Lagarde told CNBC last week that “we’re heading towards our [inflation] target in the course of 2025, so that disinflationary process is so much on track that we are nearing completion.”

Lagarde and other policymakers last week warned the picture for inflation was less clear in the medium-term, with factors such as potential retaliation countermeasures from Europe against U.S. tariffs and fiscal shifts like Germany’s major infrastructure package coming into play.

Lagarde said the ECB would be “data dependent to the extreme,” when making interest rate decisions. The central bank last cut interest rates last month, taking its key rate — the deposit facility rate — to 2.25%, down from highs of 4% in mid-2023.

An interest cut in June seems appropriate amid many deflationary forces, ECB governing council member says

Several major euro zone economies had already earlier in the week released their latest inflation figures, which are harmonized for comparability across the bloc. Germany’s statistics office said Wednesday it expects consumer prices to have risen by 2.2% in April, below the previous month’s reading but slightly higher than expected. Meanwhile French harmonized inflation came in at 0.8%, also slightly ahead of expectations.

Data released earlier this week indicated that the euro zone economy could be picking up steam, with the bloc’s gross domestic product rising 0.4% in the first quarter of 2025, according to a preliminary reading. This was higher than the forecast of 0.2%, and followed a revised 0.2% growth print in the last quarter of 2024.

Growth is however widely expected to slow in the coming months due to the global tariff fallout.

Economics

Trump greenlights Nippon merger with US Steel

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A tugboat pushes a barge near the U.S. Steel Corp. Clairton Coke Works facility in Clairton, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 9, 2024.

Justin Merriman | Bloomberg | Getty Images

President Donald Trump said Friday that U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel will form a “partnership,” after the Japanese steelmaker’s bid to acquire its U.S. rival had been blocked on national security grounds.

“This will be a planned partnership between United States Steel and Nippon Steel, which will create at least 70,000 jobs, and add $14 Billion Dollars to the U.S. Economy,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

U.S. Steel’s headquarters will remain in Pittsburgh and the bulk of the investment will take place over the next 14 months, the president said. U.S. Steel shares jumped more than 24%.

President Joe Biden blocked Nippon Steel from purchasing U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion in January, citing national security concerns. Biden said at the time that the acquisition would create a risk to supply chains that are critical for the U.S.

Trump, however, ordered a new review of the proposed acquisition in April, directing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to determine “whether further action in this matter may be appropriate.”

This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.

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Economics

A court resurrects the United States Institute of Peace

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The night the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was taken over, March 17th, staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) walked round its headquarters smoking cigars and drinking beers while they dismantled the signage and disabled the computer systems. The takeover of the USIP building in Washington, DC, earlier that afternoon was one of the more notable moments of President Donald Trump’s revolution in the capital, because the think-tank is not actually part of the executive branch. The Institute’s board and president, George Moose, a veteran diplomat, were summarily fired. He and other senior staff were ultimately forced out of the building at the behest of three different police agencies. Then a DOGE staffer handed over the keys to the building to the federal government.

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Economics

How much worse could America’s measles outbreak get?

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AMERICA’S MEASLES outbreak is alarming for several reasons. What began as a handful of cases in Texas in January has now surpassed 800 across several states, with many more cases probably going unreported. It is the worst outbreak in 30 years and has already killed three people. Other smaller outbreaks bring the total number of cases recorded in 2025 so far to over 1,000. But above all, public-health experts worry that the situation now is a sign of worse to come. Falling vaccination rates and cuts to public-health services could make such outbreaks more frequent and impossible to curb, eventually making measles endemic in the country again.

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