There’s a growing interconnectedness between virtual assets and financial markets. Crypto assets such as Bitcoin have matured from an obscure asset class with few users to an integral part of the digital asset revolution, raising financial stability concerns. 'Crypto assets are no longer on the fringe of the financial system.' The market value of these novel assets rose to nearly $3 trillion in November from $620 billion in 2017, on soaring popularity among retail and institutional investors alike, despite high volatility. This...

Shipping costs soared over the past year as consumers unleashed pent-up savings to buy new merchandise while the pandemic continued to snarl the world’s supply chains. Container rates have more than quadrupled since the start of the pandemic, with some of the biggest gains concentrated in the first three quarters of last year. Lockdowns, labor shortages, and strains on logistics networks led to shipping-cost increases and significantly lengthened delivery times , though those pressures are easing. Our Chart of...

Pandemic-related special factors led to unusually low inflation in 2020 and unusually high inflation in 2021, Chief Economist Philip R. Lane tells Il Sole 24 Ore. 2022 is a transition phase: high inflation will be fading this year | Euro area HICP inflation in December hit another record all-time high. Maybe a peak. Markets are now even more convinced that the ECB is going to raise interest rates at the end of this year. Is this data going to derail...

Today, the EU Commission and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) launched the new EU SME Fund, which offers vouchers for EU-based SMEs to help them protect their intellectual property (IP) rights. This is the second EU SME Fund aiming at supporting SMEs in the COVID-19 recovery and green and digital transitions for the next three years (2022-2024). Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: “Small is beautiful, but if SMEs want to grow or take...

During the post-pandemic recovery, the US and UK labour markets show many similarities, albeit with different implications for wages. This box reviews post-pandemic labour market developments in the United States and United Kingdom. It shows that, in both countries, imbalances between labour demand and labour supply are causing a high and unusual tightness for such an early stage in a recovery. This could translate into broad-based wage pressures, in turn posing a risk to inflation. Such pressures are becoming...

The global recovery is continuing but its momentum has eased and is becoming increasingly imbalanced according to the OECD’s latest Economic Outlook. The failure to ensure rapid and effective vaccination everywhere is proving costly with uncertainty remaining high due to the continued emergence of new variants of the virus. Output in most OECD countries has now surpassed where it was in late-2019 and is gradually returning to the path expected before the pandemic. However, lower-income economies, particularly ones where vaccination...

On 20 December 2021, the OECD published detailed rules to assist in the implementation of a landmark reform to the international tax system, which will ensure Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) will be subject to a minimum 15% tax rate from 2023. The Pillar Two model rules provide governments a precise template for taking forward the two-pillar solution to address the tax challenges arising from digitalisation and globalisation of the economy agreed in October 2021 by 137 countries and jurisdictions under the...