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The think tank Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) predicts the UK economy will outstrip France and Germany within two decades even if Britain stays in the EU. But while leaving the organisation would have initial negative consequences, the CEBR's chief executive Douglas McWilliams suspects "that over a 15-year period, it would probably be positive." Britain is set to vote on a referendum on EU membership in 2017. The report predicts the UK's GDP will first move to fifth place ahead of France by 2018 before leapfrogging Germany around 2030. However, despite being forecast to be the second most successful of the Western economies after the US, it will fall behind the accelerating economies of India and Brazil. "Germany is forecast to lose its position as the largest Western European economy to the UK around 2030 because of the UK's faster population growth and lesser dependence on the other European economies," the report said. But added: "If the euro were to break up, Germany's outlook would be much better. "A Deutsche Mark-based Germany certainly would not be overtaken by the UK for many years if ever." It added that a factor driving the UK's move ahead of Germany is the assumption of a falling value for the euro, Germany's falling population and the UK's rising population. The gap between the two countries will fall from almost £610billion in 2013 to just £183billion in five years. The UK's GDP will grow from more than £1.59trillion in 2013 to £2.6trillion in 2028, compared to China which is predicted to be in top position with a GDP of more than £20.5trillion, ahead of the US with an estimated £19.7trillion Japan will fall from its steady position in the global league of third to fourth by 2028, overtaken by India and followed by Brazil, Germany and the UK. The positive report on the economy comes as a poll reveals more people believe they would be helped rather than harmed by a rise in interest rates. A survey reveals that a pre-

By Maria Gallucci - Global economic growth is expected to dip this year, following the fiercely cold winter that plagued the United States and turbulence in Ukraine and the world's financial markets. The World Bank on Tuesday said it reduced its global growth forecast to 2.8 percent this year, down from a January projection of 3.2 percent, Bloomberg News reported. The U.S. forecast was cut to 2.1 percent from 2.8 percent, and outlooks for Brazil, Russia, India and China also fell -- a sign that emerging economies aren't moving fast enough or investing sufficiently in domestic structural reforms, which are needed to accelerate economic expansion, according to the Washington-based institution. It recommended smaller budget deficits, higher interest rates and productivity-boosting measures to stave off future financial unrest, Bloomberg said. The growth setbacks, however, might be short-lived. The 2015 projection for global economic growth held steady at 3.4 percent, Bloomberg noted, and growth is expected to regain speed this year despite earlier weaknesses, the World Bank said in its Global Economic Prospects report. "The financial health of economies has improved. ... But we are not totally out of the woods yet," Kaushik Basu, the lender's chief economist, said. "A gradual tightening of fiscal policy and structural reforms are desirable to restore fiscal space depleted by the 2008 financial crisis. In brief, now is the time to prepare for the next crisis."

Democratic presidents tend to preside over better economies than Republican ones, but that may be down to pure luck, according to a recent paper from Alan Blinder and Mark Watson at Princeton. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. economy has grown at an average real rate of 4.35% under Democratic presidents and only 2.54% under Republicans. So what gives? "Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large D-R growth gap to better macroeconomic policies, but the data do not support such a claim," they write. "It seems we must look instead to several variables that are mostly 'good luck.'" Three factors can explain 46-62% of the growth gap, according to the paper. Here are the reasons (via James Hamilton): Oil shocks. With the exception of Jimmy Carter, oil price shocks tend to dog Republican administrations more. The 1956-57 Suez Crisis, early-70s OPEC embargo, 1980 Iran-Iraq War, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 all happened during Republican administrations. Productivity. It's hard to say that a U.S. president is responsible here, but Democrats tend to see bigger gains in productivity. Bill Clinton, for example, enjoyed a big boost in U.S. productivity during the 1990s. Consumer confidence. Consumers tend to have a rosier outlook on the U.S. economy in the first year a Democrat is in the White House. "Yet the superior growth record under Democrats is not forecastable by standard techniques, which means it cannot be attributed to superior initial conditions," they write. Chalk this one up to luck again, but it does come "tantalizingly close to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which consumers correctly expect the economy to do better under Democrats, then make that happen by purchasing more consumer durables."

Spain's economic crisis, the government's response to it, and pervasive corruption have inspired a flowering of the black market economy. FORTUNE -- Outside the front door of an IKEA in the Barcelona suburb of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a group of men -- mostly immigrants from Ecuador -- offer shoppers informal delivery services. In Spain's crisis economy, it's a competitive business -- to cut down on conflict, the drivers pick numbered balls to set a queue -- and with some negotiating, a shopper can get immediate delivery for less than what IKEA's official drivers charge.

McAfee report paints grim picture of lucrative industry, despite incomplete data. Cybercrime could be costing the global economy as much as $575 billion annually, according to a new report from McAfee. The Intel-owned security company based its estimate on a range of sources, from government agencies to NGOs and academic institutions, counting both direct and indirect costs. The report, Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime explained the methodology as follows: "This study assumes that the cost of cybercrime is a constant share of national income, adjusted for levels of development. We calculated the likely global cost by looking at publically available data from individual countries, buttressed by interviews with government officials and experts. We looked for confirming evidence for these numbers by looking at data on IP theft, fraud, or recovery costs. In addition to a mass of anecdotes, we ultimately found aggregate data for 51 countries in all regions of the world who account for 80% of global income. We used this data to estimate the global cost, adjusting for differences among regions." However, the vendor cautioned that "differences in the thoroughness of national accounting", as well as underreporting of incidents and the difficulty of valuing IP all make calculations an imprecise art. High income countries lost more as a percentage of GDP, which could be because they have better accounting systems in place and/or that their IP is more valuable and therefore a bigger target for criminals. The $575bn figure therefore comes from extrapolating a global total from high loss countries. It could be as low as $375bn if McAfee had extrapolated from "all countries where we could find open source data".

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's government acknowledged for the first time on Monday that the economy was in crisis, undermining earlier attempts by officials to suggest albeit weakening growth it could weather sanctions over Ukraine. Moscow markets wait to see the full scale of western measures over the seizure of Ukraine's Crimea and support of its referendum to join Russia, after losing billions of dollars in recent weeks in state and corporate money. More from Corliss: http://corlissonlinegroup.com/ http://corlissonlinegroup.com/blog/ https://www.facebook.com/corlissonlinefinancialmag https://twitter.com/CorlissGroupMag

Janet Yellen said in prepared remarks to be delivered in a confirmation hearing on Thursday that the Federal Reserve helped restart the economy after the recession, but still there's more work to be done. "We have made good progress, but we have farther to go to regain the ground lost in the crisis and the recession," reads the statement. Yellen is at present serving as vice-chair on the Federal Reserve Board, she is nominated by President Obama to succeed Ben Bernanke as head of the central bank. Bernanke's second term ends January 31, and in spite of the protests from a few Tea Party members, Yellen is mostly anticipated to be long-established for the position before then. Ten in the morning Eastern, Thursday, her hearing before the Senate Banking Committee is scheduled.

Economist: U.S. labor market recovery is a fraud http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2013/10/02/economist-us-labor-market-recovery.html University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith has this to say about the current labor market recovery: It's a fraud. That's because there's more to assessing economic recovery than just monthly payroll job gains and a declining unemployment rate, he said. "You need to look at the number of jobs being created in the context of the potential number of workers in the U.S. economy," Snaith said. "The gap between payroll employment and the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the potential number of workers in the U.S. economy is pretty darn scary right now." If payroll job growth were to persist at the average level of the past three jobs reports and increase at just 148,000 jobs per month, it would take until December 2021 for employment to reach its CBO estimated potential, he added. In his 2013 third-quarter U.S. forecast, Snaith explains that by just focusing on the unemployment rate, many analysts erroneously are predicting a fast recovery that's simply not there yet. That's why it's not surprising that consumers are holding back on spending, which in the past has brought the economy out of the doldrums, he said. Snaith was only one of four national economists to predict that the federal Reserve Bank would continue to funnel billions of dollars into the market on a daily basis as a way to help stimulate the economy and not begin tapering that process until 2014. "Will the Federal Reserve's exit be more like Ginger Rogers gliding across the dance floor or Miley Cyrus awkwardly twerking remains to be seen," Snaith said. "But given the phony labor-market recovery it could be some time before the Fed hits the dance floor." More Related Article: http://www.wattpad.com/25728832-the-corliss-group-stocks-surge-past-economic http://www.yellowbook.com/profile/corliss-group-the_1855

Amerikanska företag lagt 166,000 nya arbetstillfällen i September, enligt den jätte lön fast ADP, som varnade som jobb återhämtning "uppmjukning". Siffrorna kommit som Labor Department bekräftade det inte skulle släppa regeringens officiella månatliga jobb tally på fredagen på grund av regeringen stängningen. Enligt ADP: s senaste månatliga undersökning ledde servicesektorn återigen antalet jobb tillväxt, bidra 149.000 arbetstillfällen under månaden. Tillväxtområdena var handel och transport, som lagt till 54.000 inlägg, professionell och företagstjänster, som lagt till 27.000 arbetstillfällen, och konstruktion, som lagt till 16.000 inlägg. Ungefär 4 000 arbetstillfällen gick förlorade i finansiell verksamhet. Augustis ADP jobb tillväxt nummer reviderades till 159,000 från 176.000. Mark Zandi, chefsekonom på Moody's Analytics, ADP: s partner på betänkandet, sade: "arbetsmarknaden verkar har mjuknat under de senaste månaderna. Finanspolitiska åtstramningar har börjat ta en vägtull på skapande av arbetstillfällen. Upptakten av räntorna kan också göra några skador på jobb inom finansiella tjänster. Medan jobb har mattats, återstår det en allmän motståndskraft på marknaden. Sysselsättningen fortsätter att överensstämma med en långsamt sjunkande arbetslöshet." Avstängningen har lett Labor Department att skrinlägga sina jobb betänkande denna vecka. Ekonomer hade väntat USA för att lägga till 175.000 till 185.000 jobb till sina nonfarm löner figur i September. Förra månaden USA lagt 169,000 nya jobb och arbetslösheten doppade till 7,3%. ADP: s siffror har spårat den Labor Departments under de senaste månaderna men omfattar inte statliga jobb. Federala och lokala regeringar fortsätter att kasta arbetstagare. ADP sade att småföretag ledde återhämtning. Företag med 49 eller färre anställda lagt till 74.000 jobb i September, medan sysselsättningen bland små och medelstora företag med 50-499 a

Large banks and trading firms are frantically trying to determine whether they have fallen victim to a suspected commodities fraud emanating from the giant Qingdao Port in northeast China. Citigroup and several other large Western banks are concerned that their loans may lack the appropriate collateral, big stockpiles of copper and aluminum at the port. The banks have inspectors on the ground who are trying to assess whether enough of the metals are there. The worry stems from suspicions that a Chinese companies pledged the same collateral for multiple loans. Chinese authorities are investigating the matter. The case could have broad repercussions for the commodities market and the Chinese economy. Banks have funneled billions of dollars into the Chinese economy through these murky transactions, and commodities prices have been falling over concerns that such lending will dry up. Western banks, including Citigroup, are bracing for any potential fallout. Just months ago, Citigroup fell victim to a multimillion-dollar fraud in Mexico. If the Qingdao developments harm the bank, regulators and shareholders are likely to press it to explain why its controls had failed again. Chinese companies are at risk, too.