Word: banking
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...growing. The U.K. is teetering on the edge of recession. And Germany, Europe's biggest economy, is finally showing signs of a marked deterioration. "It's hard to find a country that's keeping its head above water," says Véronique Riches-Flores, chief European economist at French bank Société Générale. Business leaders ranging from Sir Stuart Rose at British retailer Marks & Spencer to Renault's CEO Carlos Ghosn are sounding the alarm. At Burberry, the luxury-goods firm, CEO Angela Ahrendts frets about a combination of rising costs, falling demand...
...Inflation When Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), announced a 0.25 percentage point increase in Europe's key lending rate on July 3, he contended that it was critical to stave off the so-called secondary effects of inflation and "to neutralize the growing risks to price stability." In plain English, that means he's worried about an inflationary spiral in which manufacturers of industrial and consumer goods raise prices to compensate for higher costs - and workers demand hefty pay increases so they can afford the rising cost of their household purchases. The risk...
Trichet's critics, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy, say it makes no sense for the ECB to raise interest rates to fight frothy commodity-market prices, and Trichet himself signaled that the bank isn't planning any more rate hikes in the near future. But surging inflation poses a huge threat to Europe's chances of beating the downturn, especially when combined with weak growth. Inflation is perhaps the trickiest economic indicator to forecast: for example, over the past year, the ECB's staff has based each of its inflation projections on an assumption that oil prices will stabilize...
...investors; its stock has dropped by 95% in the past year. Several Spanish homebuilders and construction firms are also struggling. Hetal Mehta, an economist at Ernst & Young in London, says U.K. house prices - which have dropped about 8% from their peak last year - could fall another 10%. Deutsche Bank figures the total drop could be closer to 25% by the end of 2010. Whatever the eventual decline, housing woes are already casting a chill on spending. For example, says Mehta, there has been "a dramatic fall" in sales of household goods such as dishwashers and refrigerators in the past...
...Mahameed is an avid believer in Mahatma Gandhi's dictum that truth leads to non-violence, and he sees himself practicing a kind of ju-jitsu, using Israel's own moral superiority over the Holocaust as a way to shame the Israeli occupiers in the West Bank into treating the Palestinians more humanely. "If the Israelis believe that the Holocaust justifies this kind of brutal discrimination, then they're wrong." He travels through army checkpoints showing his ID card and a photo from Auschwitz. At first he's met with suspicion. "I tell the soldiers that this could...