U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will issue an urgent plea to world leaders at a food summit in Rome on Tuesday to immediately suspend trade restrictions, agricultural taxes and other price controls that have helped fuel the highest food prices in 30 years, according to U.N. officials.
Consumer prices in Uruguay during May increased 0.87%, accumulating 4.10% in the first five months of 2008, according to the country's Statistics Institute (INE), latest release. The index is higher than the average forecasted by 28 Central Bank consultants that anticipated 0.7%.
The European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet set the tone at the ECB's 10th anniversary event by warning that bad management of the oil crisis in the 1970s (meaning large wage rises and low interest rates) seriously hurt the economy and jobs, and that the errors of the past must not be repeated. This anniversary is no time for complacency, Trichet said.
Under the title of Argentine alert as inflation specter stalks half the world, London's Daily Telegraph, --using Argentina as a lead case--, describes how international bankers managed to convince pension funds to invest in an estimated 300 billion US dollars in inflation linked sovereign bonds from emerging economies, which hawk eyes then considered safe.
Peru is planning a sustained growth averaging 7% until 2015, with minimum inflation based on the opening of the economy that has seen tariffs drastically cut in the last two years, said the country's Economy minister Luis Carranza during a visit to Chile where he was the main speaker at a trade forum.
Chile announced Monday a one billion US dollars injection to the fuel prices stabilization fund and another 250 million US dollars to prop the government owned fuel company ENAP in an attempt to ease the impact of ever increasing international crude prices.
Unemployment continues to creep up in Chile, but the construction and financial services sectors softened the blow by adding more jobs in April than any other sector, the Chilean Statistics Institute (INE) reported on Thursday.
Carlos Slim, president of Telmex, Mexico's telecommunications giant said he was confident in the current and future growth of Latinamerica during his participation in a forum in Mexico City to celebrate the country's fiftieth anniversary of the Economics Circle.
United States former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Friday in Canada that he does not expect another bubble in world markets for a long time but warned about the threat of inflation.
Inflation in the Euro zone bounced to a record 3.6% in May amid soaring oil prices, according to a first estimate from the EU Eurostat data agency released on Friday. The 12-month inflation rate had eased in April to 3.3% after hitting 3.6% in March, the highest level since the launch of the Euro in 1999.