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Australian retail sales suffered a historic plunge in April while the trade surplus narrowed as the coronavirus battered the economy, leaving the nation facing its worst ever contraction in the current quarter.

Retail sales slumped a seasonally adjusted 17.7% in April, their biggest on record, from an 8.5% jump in March, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed on Thursday.

Separate data showed exports dropped 11% and imports 10% in some of the largest declines in years.

Unfavorable economic conditions, chiefly rising interest rates and the struggling stock market, are taking a toll on Manhattan’s high-end housing sector, according to a report Monday from Olshan Realty.  There were 21 contracts signed in the week ending Sunday that were priced at $4 million or more—the report’s benchmark for luxury—marking the third week in a row of slumping deals, Donna Olshan wrote in her eponymous weekly market review. 

The priciest contract signed last week was on a full-floor penthouse at 53 West 53rd St. in Midtown, which had been most recently asking for a hair above $33 million. Spanning 4,599 square feet, the property has views of Central Park and the Hudson and East Rivers.  Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, and adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art, the building offers its residents amenities including a golf simulator, a wine room, a library and a theater. 

“We’ve seen a lag in the impact that rising interest rates have had on the market, likely because many buyers may not be aware of what this has done to their budget,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com. The site released a report Thursday finding that for the 19th consecutive week, U.S. home prices saw double-digit year-over-year increases, with the median listing price rising by 14.4% from the same week last year. Homes also spent six fewer days on the market during the week ending April 23 than during the same period last year, according to Realtor’s findings.

In a recent Gallup poll, 30% of Americans rated the U.S economy as “excellent” or “good” and 22% said it was “poor.” Of course, the answer depends on one’s particular circumstances and – as Gallup notes – on whether one is a Republican or Democrat.

But which is it? Here’s my (short) answer.

The U.S. economy of 2017 is not the economy of 2009 or even 2013. It has finally recovered from the Great Recession.

Verizon Communications Inc. wants to attract teens and millennials who are more used to watching videos on their mobile phones than on a TV in a living room. Yahoo! Inc., which is spinning out its main Web business, has been investing heavily in online-video content.

So it’s probably not a coincidence that executives at the largest U.S. wireless carrier were chattier than usual this week when asked the question: Would Verizon be interested in buying Yahoo’s Internet assets?

Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo, using similar language, both said within the past two days that Verizon would look at a Yahoo deal "if it made sense," instead of declining to comment. 

Her show might be gone but the “Oprah Effect” clearly endures.

After Oprah Winfrey said on Monday she would buy a 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers and take a seat on the board, the company’s slumping stock doubled to $13.92 per share, adding about $400 million to its market value

Ms. Winfrey also plans to give Weight Watchers unfettered access to her name and face for marketing purposes.

we currently have an unemployment rate around 20 percent, which would be worse than all but the worst two years of the Great Depression.

The question now is how quickly we can recover.

But getting the virus under control doesn’t mean “flattening the curve,” which, by the way, we did — we managed to slow the spread of Covid-19 enough that our hospitals weren’t overwhelmed. It means crushing the curve: getting the number of infected Americans way down, then maintaining a high level of testing to quickly spot new cases, combined with contact tracing so that we can quarantine those who may have been exposed.

FOR MUCH of the past half-decade, the operative word in the energy sector was “abundance”. An industry that had long sought to ration the production of fossil fuels to keep prices high suddenly found itself swamped with oversupply, as America’s shale boom lowered the price of oil around the world and clean-energy sources, such as wind and solar, competed with other fuels used for power generation, such as coal and natural gas.

In recent weeks, however, it is a shortage of energy, rather than an abundance of it, that has caught the world’s attention.

Britain’s miffed motorists are suffering from a shortage of lorry drivers to deliver petrol. Power cuts in parts of China partly stem from the country’s attempts to curb emissions. Dwindling coal stocks at power stations in India are linked to a surge in the price of imports of the commodity.

The energy shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the biggest collapse in German living standards since the second world war and a downturn in economic output comparable to the 2008 financial crisis, a stark assessment has found.

real wages in the country slumped further in 2022 than in any year since 1950.

A failure to protect German industry from the energy price spike may turn the 2020s into “a lost decade for Germany” and further fuel the rise of the populist far-right Alternative für De

Today, however, I’d like to talk about a different but related kind of desperation: the frantic effort to find some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded.

let nobody accuse the austerians of lacking a sense of romance; in fact, they’ve spent years looking for Mr. Goodpain.

in March 2010; at the time Ireland’s unemployment rate was 13.3 percent. Since then, every uptick in the Irish economy has been hailed as proof that the nation is recovering — but as of last month the unemployment rate was 14.6 percent, only slightly down from the peak it reached early last year.

a zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both. The classic zombie idea in U.S. political discourse is the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves

the big question: How did we get into the mess we’re in? The financial crisis of 2008 and its painful aftermath, which we’re still dealing with, were a huge slap in the face for free-market fundamentalists. Circa 2005, the usual suspects — conservative publications, analysts at right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and so on — insisted that deregulated financial markets were doing just fine, and dismissed warnings about a housing bubble as liberal whining. Then the nonexistent bubble burst, and the financial system proved dangerously fragile; only huge government bailouts prevented a total collapse.

What about responding to the crisis? Four years ago, right-wing economic analysts insisted that deficit spending would destroy jobs, because government borrowing would divert funds that would otherwise have gone into business investment, and also insisted that this borrowing would send interest rates soaring. The right thing, they claimed, was to balance the budget, even in a depressed economy.

"I've borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts," he told CNBC. "I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”

Trump has promised to make America great again. But a closer look his policy proposals, such as they are, suggests that within his first few years as president, he would more likely make American recessionary again.

Meanwhile, he has no plans to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid, benefits for veterans, defense, or Social Security, which, along with mandatory payments on the debt,

The Evolution of 'Like'

It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like.

So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population. The seeds of the modern like lay among ordinary people; the Beatniks may not even have played a significant role in what happened later. The point is that like transformed from something occasional into something more regular.

Exports of industrial parts dropped 5.5 percent on-year to $177.2 billion, with shipments of industrial materials falling 3.1 percent to $74.8 billion.

Its imports dipped 4.5 percent on-year to $152.5 billion.

By region, exports to China, South Korea's biggest trade partner, contributed to the overall decline as they slumped 11.5 percent on-year to $82.7 billion, while those to the United States edged down 0.7 percent to $26.8 billion.

Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.

For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

why is Britain doing exactly what it shouldn’t? Unlike the governments of, say, Spain or California, the British government can borrow freely, at historically low interest rates. So why is that government sharply reducing investment and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger

I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.

The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”

It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.

Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth.