The U.S. trade deficit surged in November as a growing consumer appetite for imported goods such as smartphones and cars more than offset a much smaller rise in exports. The nation's trade gap grew by nearly 16% from a month earlier to $48.7 billion, the biggest deficit since April.

This article tells us that the trade deficit (the level of imports exceeds the ones of exports) in the U.S has been a constant issue, however as we can read, the article states that the trade deficit has narrowed more than expected to 43.2 billion instead of 43.5 billion, this is the smallest deficit ever since January 2010, when the deficit was 51.9 billion. One of the factors that have contributed to this change is the great and significant drop in oil imports.

This article gives an example of how the value of the currency may benefit the economy but also affect the economy in the short and long run. Venezuela has faced food shortages in the past years, so the government decided to devalue its currency, in order to ease this shortages that are progressively increasing. However, it is expected that this measure will increase inflation and eventually weaken the economy more than it already is. As bolivars are worth less, then less American dollars can be exchanged, affecting the economy and the shortages becauseless imports can be purchased, and some of these imports are really essential (e.g. cornmeal, chicken, sugar, etc), and as it is stated Venezuela is really dependant on imports. This is a perfect example of how a weak currency may be positive yet really negative at the same time.

Brazil's central bank announced a $60 billion program on Thursday aimed at halting the slide of the Brazilian real, making Brazil the latest emerging economy to seek to prop up its sagging currency. Similar moves have been made by central banks in Indonesia and Turkey. I chose this article because it covers one of the most important aspects of foreign currency, which is the depreciation of it. The consequences of having a weak currency could be severe, as the value decreases in comparison with other currencies, for example Euros, therefore it will take more Brazilian Reals to buy Euros (1 Euro= 2.98804259 Brazilian Reals). In this case this depreciation of the currency has led to some action from the Central Bank in order to boost up the value of the currency. This does not only affect Brazil, it also happens to other emergent economies such as India.

Although this article focuses on protectionism, in my opinion trade barriers come along. The WTO has lately noticed of an economic and trade slowdown because ofprotectionism, the global trade growth is estimated to decline from 5% to 4.5% next year which is alarming due to the fact the world's economy needs to recover. The article also talks about how trade protectionism is becoming more difficult to fight because it is difficult to fight because of the complexity and because its coming in different ways that we are not used to (for example:tariffs and export subsidies), and more and more regulations are being imposed each day.

This article talks about how members of the WTO have a possitive view towards Japan because they didnt apply protectionism policies even though their situation was critical at a certain point. Japan would have not been able to go through all the issues that have affected the country in the past few years if it wasn't for taking the right decissions. In order to boost up the economy, and local producers the government did not intervene so there would still be competition from international producers thus encouraging local producers to work hard to improve the quality of their goods and recover as quick as possible from the natural and economical catastrophes the country has gone through.

This article talks about the economic growth that is occuring in many African countries, this is probably the region with the highest growth of the world. In the past and still now Africa has been the region with the highest inequalities and the one with the highest poverty rates, however, due to its productivity more and more people are becoming weathier and even a middle class is starting to emerge. Furthermore, economic growth doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is being benefitted, the majority of this continent lives below poverty levels, and live under disease and hunger. The Economist had labelled Africa "the hopeless continent" a decade ago, a profound change has taken hold. Labour productivity has been rising. It is now growing by, on average, 2.7% a year. Trade between Africa and the rest of the world has increased by 200% since 2000. Inflation dropped from 22% in the 1990s to 8% in the past decade.

This article talks about how the recovery in the economic growth in India has weakened after three months of straight-increase, however the economic growth of India remains positive. This situation has been manly caused by the fact that there has been a slowdown in consumer sectors and investor demand and mantaining the confidence for these two would be essential to ensure a sustained economic growth. The BluFin Business Cycle Indicator (BCI), aims to meet everthing of the business cycle, and took into account five areas -- capital markets, foreign trade, policy, real economy and survey to determine and measure this situation

This article talks about the possibility of deflation in the US. Deflation would be a problem for a number of reasons: first, deflation would make it more difficult to engineer an economic recovery; second, deflation could result in a "death spiral" like what happened (according to one interpretation) during the early 1930s. This article suggests that unlike times of good economic state, the policy that should be taken during a crisis should be decreasing supply instead of increasing it, this would be the easiest way to stop deflation.

This article tells us how the recession in the United States has affected the unemployment rate; people consume less thus the aggregate demand is lower and remains like this as unemployment increases. I also found important something that is mentioned: "During a deep recession, more workers move into the category of those who take a long time to find new jobs, and so the decline in unemployment across the labour force as a whole is quite slow" Factors mentioned in this article are what determine the real GDP to be 6% under the trend path.

I found this article very interesting, it relates to Green GDP. The Indian government is aiming to use natural resources, and fight global warming, India is one of the most affected countries due to global warming. India's stand in the fight against global warming will let them be in a better position on negotiations about cutting emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 which take place in Denmark. India has no obligations to actually reduce emission as it is still a developing countries and as it says in the article it is a "proof of its sincerity in fighting climate change". The Indian governmen t will even consider their Green GDP as part of their economic growth. This won't be an easy challenge for India though due to millions of people living in poverty and having to burn fossil fuels so their lives improve.

This article talks about the situation in Spain, the government is imposing a new plan for its budget, they unveiled taxes hikes and spending cuts that aims at shaving €65 billion off the state budget in aperiod of two and a half years. Some of the cuts will be on subsidies for miners which has caused a lot of protests. The president of Spain says that the situation that they're living now will determine Spain's future. The measurtes taken include a wage cut for civil servants and members of the national parliament and a new wave of closures at state-owned companies. Spain will also speed up a gradual increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67.

This article talks about an experiment made in Chile. The use given to our oceans are no good, the article encourages huge changes in the governance of world's ocean to save them from pollution, over-fishing and other impacts made by the humans. All of these factors affect the marine ecosystem in a drastic way, now the levels of fish are decreasing as it says in the article "There was a general recognition that Chile's fish stocks were in trouble," says Professor Carl Folke. This has led to some fisheries to collapse leading the Chilean government for being responsible to take actions.This serves as an example of what's happening in the world today and for facin this problem he suggests that "You need a shared recognition that something has to be done, you need a good understanding of the marine ecosystem and how to regenerate it, you need a strong rapport between scientists and fishers, and you need a political moment when sweeping changes can be brought in." This problem needs to be faced responsibly otherwise there will be almost no fish stocks in the future, treating our commons well is important for us humans as this affects goods that are importand for living.

A trade group representing milk processors debuted an ad campaign Tuesday to eliminate New Deal-era federal price controls on unprocessed milk. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) complains that the current price support system for dairy farmers dates back to 1937. Its ads call for "Big Government to get out of your milk." The main concern is that family with children are gradually paying more for milk hence the consumption of milk has dropped in the past years.

This article talks about how the US government wants to take some reforms on health care with an ambitious plan made by the president Obama and the rest of the Democrats, the plan is that by imposing an excise tax on expensive health insurances enough revenue would be collected to provide the poorer with health insurances, unfortunely for Obama and the Democrats many people are against this reform, one of them saying that; "it would set the middle class against the poor - people struggling to keep health insurance against people struggling to get it." As many people in the congress are against this Congressional Democrats are looking for a better way to get the revenue needed in order to take this ambitious plan ahead.