China: will the change in the authorities’ rhetoric be enough to restore confidence?

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:7 mins read

Whereas Chinese public policy has traditionally targeted supply, notably through various forms of support for businesses (grants, tax credits, access to liquidity), and Xi Jinping used to regularly slam “welfare societies” where the welfare state and Keynesian mechanisms play a role, this shift in tone means there is now more…

France: Banque de France says slightly lower growth and inflation in 2025 and 2026

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:6 mins read

The findings of the Banque de France Monthly Business Survey – Start of March show that industrial activity continued to grow in February, contrary to last month’s expectations. Conversely, there was little growth in market services and construction. Business leaders expect modest growth in market services in March but little…

Mexico: an economy endangered by US trade tensions

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:7 mins read

Mexico has gone to considerable effort, reducing migrant flows by 66%, putting soldiers on the border, handing drug traffickers over to the US authorities and proposing to match US import tariffs on Chinese goods. The country is even considering withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).Mexican markets have proved relatively stable,…

China: is DeepSeek Chinese markets’ salvation or death knell?

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:8 mins read

The DeepSeek phenomenon The first trend, as yet unconfirmed, is a “DeepSeek effect”. Unveiled on 20 January, this artificial intelligence, officially developed on a shoestring budget in comparison to the amount invested by the Americans in ChatGPT and Perplexity, has set share prices in the Chinese tech sector – which…

China: growth is a “positive surprise” but serious questions remain

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:12 mins read

While China achieving its growth target is nothing new, the slowdown in a number of sectors (e.g. real estate and consumer goods) and the deflationary trend in the economy suggest that the reported growth number may be overstated. Worries over the strength and, above all, the sustainability of China’s economic…

Everything is now related…

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:10 mins read

Tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold have long been classed as “conflict minerals”1. But they are an even greater source of conflict now that everyone knows the climate and technology transitions are impossible without them. Simply put, they are the foundation stone of promises of growth, and therefore a major political…

Slowing growth is making trade-offs more complicated in India

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:6 mins read

  Why the slowdown?  The answer lies in inflation, which is extremely volatile in India. Driven by food prices, it has been oscillating between 5% and 6% for the past few months. Prices are putting pressure on wages, which are stagnating or even falling slightly, and thereby on household consumption, the…

South Korea: K-drama in Seoul

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:8 mins read

After agreeing to turn himself in to avoid “bloodshed”, the president was remanded in custody for 48 hours – a first in South Korean political history, and is still detiained. Tension has ratcheted up between two broad groupings: on the one hand, a presidential security service determined to protect Yoon…

Trump and Fear: the new alliance between mercantilism and geopolitics

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:10 mins read

Transactions vs. manipulation The first stage is media manipulation: what little protest Western governments have raised has been weak. There is a mix of explanations for this apparent apathy, the first of which is outright shock. At the heart of the Trump playbook (as demonstrated by many things Trump has…

World – 2025-2026 scenario: a conditional scenario, more than ever

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:8 mins read

Drawing the contours of the US (and therefore global) scenario requires making assumptions about both the scale of the measures likely to be implemented and their timing, depending on whether they fall within the prerogatives of the president or require the approval of Congress.As far as tariffs are concerned, Donald…

Following his failed power grab, South Korean President Yoon escapes impeachment

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:8 mins read

In the midst of negotiations over the budget bill, part of which had already been rejected by the centre-left opposition, which holds a parliamentary majority, President Yoon Suk Yeol decreed martial law, prohibiting all political activity and rallies and putting the press under the control of the army. This extremely…

The metaverse reborn

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:8 mins read

Euphoria The metaverse, which harnessed the power of cutting-edge electronics to create highly immersive virtual spaces, promised a flourishing meta-economy worth $12.5 trillion, according to Goldman Sachs. This new creative economy, focused entirely on consumers and their avatars, was based on the premise that 33% of the digital economy would…

Climate issues catch up with India

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:7 mins read

The city’s hospitals have also reported a huge surge in the number of consultations for pulmonary infections and respiratory difficulties. Pollution is estimated to be responsible for around 12,000 deaths a year in New Delhi, equivalent to over 10% of all deaths in the city. The authorities are in denial,…

Is China geared up to deal with the Trump onslaught?

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:9 mins read

In September, the governor of China’s central bank was first to announce a series of monetary easing measures, triggering high levels of market volatility as initial enthusiasm about the eagerly awaited response from the authorities gave way to disappointment over the lack of a fiscal component. The measures announced, mainly…

New Caledonian nickel on a razor edge

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:10 mins read

Yet the industry powers the New Caledonian economy, accounting for 20% of private sector jobs and 94% of exports. A nickel giant… Yet New Caledonia is one of the world’s top three producers of nickel, accounting for 6% of global production in 2023, albeit far behind Indonesia (50%) and the Philippines…

Will the real estate crisis bury China’s dreams of prosperity?

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:5 mins read

What makes this transition even more complicated is that it coincides with both a growth crisis and a crisis of confidence: a kind of price that must be paid to clean up after past excesses, with an overinvestment bubble – notably in real estate – in the process of deflating.…

China in the face of protectionism

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:3 mins read

How much leeway does China have? China’s initial response was swift: it announced that importers of brandy – which includes cognac – would have to put down security deposits with the Chinese customs authorities. However, charges will only be levied if the government approves a hike in import tariffs –…

World – Macro-economic Scenario 2024-2025: delicate balances

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:7 mins read

In the US, while the foundations of recent growth, tenacious beyond expectations, are showing some cracks, there are reasons to hope that they will not become too deep. On the one hand, we can count on the positive effects of an earlier cycle of monetary easing and, on the other,…

China’s central bank strives to revive sluggish growth

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:6 mins read

An unprecedented package of measures These measures were expected, but do they go far enough? Following the start of the Fed’s monetary easing cycle and the rally in the yuan over the past month, the PBoC has regained some room for manoeuvre, which it has quickly exploited to support the real…

Can Saudi Arabia affordits ambitions?

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:8 mins read

Some visibility began to emerge in 2021, when the Kingdom added a key planning tool to Vision 2030: the National Investment Strategy (NIS). This gave an indication of the investments that would be needed to deliver on the plan’s ambitions and of the stakeholders involved in financing them: Vision 2030…

Protectionism, US style

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:4 mins read

The vision of the benefits of globalisation, wherein free trade is a seen as a positive-sum game, very much in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s, has now given way to that of the potential dangers of global trade, a source of dependence and weakness. For the United States, with…

Indonesia: the fraught road from Jakarta to Nusantara

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:5 mins read

A decision driven by pragmatic considerations… The problems afflicting Jakarta include overpopulation, pollution, subsidence and flooding. With 12 million people living there – 30 million if you include the entire metropolitan area – Jakarta is overpopulated. It’s one of the world’s most densely populated cities, with more than 16,000 people…

Countervailing duties on Chinese electric vehicles

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:10 mins read

In October 2023, the European Commission launched an ex officio (i.e. started by the Commission on its own initiative rather than at the request of industry) investigation into a sample group of Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles (of the more than 300 that exist in total) and non-Chinese ones based…

Polarisation is a fever afflicting American society

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:4 mins read

We are now seeing a gradual radicalisation of extreme positions in each of the parties, rooted in identity issues. The Republicans are increasingly attracting white, religious, rural Americans, while the Democrats appeal more to racial, sexual and gender minorities and city-dwellers. At either end of the political spectrum there is…

What on earth does the South Pacific have to do with Azerbaijan?

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:9 mins read

Baku is “meddling” and this meddling is “extremely harmful”. So said Gérald Darmanin after a New Caledonian separatist elected official signed a memorandum of collaboration with the Azerbaijani Parliament. Then there is the involvement of Tavini Huira’atira (formerly the Polynesian Liberation Front) in the Baku Initiative Group, created to “stand…

The intriguing question of Chinese growth

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:5 mins read

It was as though the country was hitting back after Fitch Ratings downgraded its sovereign rating from “stable” to “negative” as a result of concerns over its medium-term growth outlook, the impact of the real estate crisis and the sustainability of its public finances. Moody’s came to the same conclusion…

China is not 1980s Japan

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:6 mins read

Before reaching its turning point in the 1990s, Japan had gone through a period of strong growth driven by exports and efforts to move up the value chain (known as the “flying geese” model), high investment and savings rates, and bank-led rather than market-led financing. At its peak in 1988,…

China: Two Sessions, one growth target and a whole lot of questions

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:7 mins read

Li Qiang, appointed to the premiership in 2023, thus had the daunting task of delivering the general policy speech and presenting the government’s most recent priorities as well as announcing key economic objectives for 2024. Unsurprisingly, an ambitious growth target of 5% was set The first announcement was no small…

Europe’s metals sector expresses its desire for independence

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:8 mins read

The consensus is clear: there will be no energy transition without strategic metals. Batteries, wind turbines and solar cells require large amounts of lithium, nickel, rare earths and other exotic elements. More broadly, strategic sectors like aerospace and defence are also dependent on critical resources whose suppliers have de facto…

More on Geopolitics and the harsh reality

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:9 mins read

This is precisely why the US has quickly moved its aircraft carriers into position close to the Israeli theatre of war to prevent the conflict from spreading. It’s also why Poland is rearming and acting as if it were one of NATO’s leading powers. Lastly, it’s the lesson that many…

Open Banking: are businesses getting real value for their data?

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:7 mins read

Thanks to the proliferation of APIs1 and the advent of Open Banking2, these FinTechs have specialised first and foremost in collecting, refining and structuring business data, notably banking and financial data.  They mass process information such as bank statements, customer and supplier billing histories and activity data from e-commerce and…

Macro-economic Scenario 2023-2024 – Normalisation plays hard to get

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:5 mins read

The US economy has been resilient but is starting to crack, and these cracks get deeper as the repressive effects of monetary and financial tightening make themselves known. Housing investment has already experienced a sharp adjustment, and real investment in turn should fall substantially. After dipping into their savings and…

Weak growth in China could be a hard dilemma

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:7 mins read

Economic activity indicators in May suggest that China is having a tough time shaking off the multitude of crises it's facing – consumer spending, real estate, a shrinking population – and now growing concerns over the prospect of a debt crisis for local governments. The story according to May figures…

NATO high-risk July meeting and more about Poland

  • Post category:Credit Agricole
  • Reading time:9 mins read

“I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that Poland would engage even stronger in this context on a national basis and be followed by the Baltic states, maybe including the possibility of troops on the ground. […] We shouldn’t underestimate the Polish feelings, the Poles feel that for too long western Europe…