Madagascar Development

Updated at 9:32 a.m. ET The coronavirus pandemic triggered the sharpest economic contraction in modern American history, the Commerce Department  reported Thursday . Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic activity — shrank at an annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter as restaurants and retailers closed their doors in a desperate effort to slow the spread of the virus, which has killed  more than 150,000 people  in the U.S. The economic shock in April, May and June was more than three times as sharp as the previous record — 10% in 1958 — and nearly four times the worst quarter during the Great Recession. "Horrific," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Markit. "We've never seen anything quite like it." Another  1.43 million people  filed for state unemployment last week, an increase of 12,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. It was the second week in a row of increased unemployment filings and shows that the economic pictu...

Selon les dernières projections du Fonds monétaire international publiées en cette fin du mois de juin, l’économie de l’Afrique subsaharienne va subir cette année une récession de 3,2%. Cette contraction serait encore plus sévère que les prévisions faites en avril qui étaient de seulement 1,6%. Même si l’Afrique reste encore le continent le moins infectée, la pandémie pourrait s’accélérer, hypothéquant les efforts de riposte contre le Covid-19 déployés dans les pays de la région. Au cours des deux derniers mois, le FMI a accordé plus de 10 milliards de dollars d’aides d'urgence à 29 pays d’Afrique subsaharienne. Parmi eux,  21 ont en plus bénéficié du moratoire sur la dette  due aux bailleurs publics internationaux. Rebond à partir de 2021 L’institution financière basée à Washington renvoie l’optimisme à l’année prochaine. Un optimisme mesuré : le FMI table en effet sur un redressement de la croissance, mais dans bon nombre de pays au sud du Sahara, la progres...

The Congressional Budget Office released its own bleak outlook Tuesday on economic growth, unemployment and the federal budget, predicting job gains later this year but an overall climate that will remain subdued through 2021. In its latest projections, the CBO sees GDP capsizing 38% on an annualized basis in the second quarter with the 26 million more unemployed Americans than there were at the end of 2019. The forecasts are roughly in line with Wall Street economists and slightly less dour than the most recent tracking number from the Atlanta Federal Reserve, which sees GDP falling about 42% in the April-to-June period. If the collective outlook is anything close to accurate, it will represent the worst drop for a U.S. economy that was brought to a halt due to efforts to stem the coronavirus pandemic. "The economy is expected to begin recovering during the second half of 2020 as concerns about the pandemic diminish and as state and local governments ease restrictions,...

he COVID-19 pandemic’s continued impact on the labor market was highlighted Thursday morning when the U.S. Labor Department released its weekly initial jobless claims report. Another 2.981 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending May 9 surpassing economists’ estimates for 2.5 million jobless claims for the week.  The prior week’s figure was revised higher to 3.18 million  from the previously reported 3.17 million jobless claims. Over the past two months, more than 36 million Americans have filed unemployment insurance claims. (Yahoo Finance/David Foster) More Continuing claims, which lags initial jobless claims data by one week, totaled a record 22.83 million in the week ending May 2 following 22.38 million continuing claims in the prior week. The weekly number of jobless claims has been steadily declining even as the cumulative number remains high. “Although initial jobless claims were still as high as 2,981,000 in the week ending 9t...

(Bloomberg) -- Of all the wild, unprecedented swings in financial markets since the coronavirus pandemic broke out, none has been more jaw-dropping than Monday’s collapse in a key segment of U.S. oil trading. The price on the futures contract for West Texas crude that is due to expire Tuesday fell into negative territory -- minus $37.63 a barrel. The reason: with the pandemic bringing the economy to a standstill, there is so much unused oil sloshing around that American energy companies have run out of room to store it. And if there’s no place to put the oil, no one wants a crude contract that is about to come due. Underscoring just how acute the concern is over the lack of immediate storage space, the price on the futures contract due a month later settled at $20.43 per barrel. That gap between the two contracts is by far the biggest ever. “The May crude oil contract is going out not with a whimper, but a primal scream,” said Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning oil historia...

NEW YORK (AP) — A barrel of oil now costs less than a cheap bottle of wine. U.S. benchmark crude was trading as low as $6.50 a barrel Tuesday, more than 80% lower than the start of the year. The dizzying drop reflected stark suffering in the global economy that has left vastly diminished demand for oil. There’s little mystery around the sharp drop-off: Efforts to limit the spread of the coronavirus have major cities around the world on lockdown, air travel has been seriously curtailed and millions of people are working from home, leading to far fewer commuters on the roads. B ut pumps are still running, extracting oil from the ground, and all that oil has to go somewhere. Some brokers were betting that storage would be more valuable than oil next month, leading some on Monday to   pay potential buyers to take oil off their hands . Many analysts saw Monday’s prices as limited to the peculiar nature of some contracts, but Tuesday’s drop signaled the industry is in for a prolo...

NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices crumpled even further Tuesday, and U.S. stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as worries swept markets worldwide about the economic carnage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The market’s spotlight was again on oil, where prices have plummeted because very few people are flying or driving, and factories have shut amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Global demand is set to drop to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. At the same time, oil producers can’t slow their production fast enough, and all the extra crude means storage tanks are quickly running out of room. The cost for a barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June plunged 43% to $11.57. That’s the part of the market that oil traders are focused on and trading most actively. For oil to be delivered next month, which is when storage tanks could top out, the cost of a barrel stood at $10.01. A day earlier, it fell below zero for the first time, meaning traders paid others to take oil off their hand...

S tocks ended Thursday’s mixed session modestly higher, after another surge in  U.S. weekly unemployment claims  and a slump in new-home construction underscored the depth and breadth of the coronavirus’  impact on the domestic economy , while officials debate a strategy to restart public life. Initially, investors reacted badly to the news that new jobless claims topped five million for the week ended April 11, which brought the four-week total to more than 22 million. Still, equity traders mostly looked past the data toward President Donald Trump and state governors moving toward a consensus on slowly reopening the economy. Meanwhile, Wall Street — which has been aggressively discounting stocks in anticipation of the coming economic calamity — is gradually looking ahead to better days. “The stock market seems to count job layoffs the same way they read the curve of new positive coronavirus cases and think that 5.245 million jobless claims this week is better and ...