Economy, Global Economy | featured news

Moody's Investors Service has downgraded France's government bond rating, citing the country's weak economic growth outlook and its exposure to Europe's economic crisis.

The 17-country eurozone has fallen back into recession for the first time in three years as the fallout from the region's financial crisis was felt from Amsterdam to Athens. And with surveys pointing to increasingly depressed conditions across the 17-member group at a time of austerity and high unemployment, the recession is forecast to deepen, and make the debt crisis — which has been calmer of late — even more difficult to handle.

The man in line to oversee China's massive but rapidly slowing economy for the coming decade speaks English and comes from a generation of politicians schooled during a time of greater openness to liberal Western ideas than their predecessors....

India's economic growth is expected to slow to around 6%, dragged by domestic issues, but the government is focused on getting the country back on a growth path, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said.

In its quest to increase oil production, Canada is lobbying job fairs and air waves for laborers. California has become a prime target... With a daughter to feed, no job and $200 in the bank, Detroit pipe fitter Scott Zarembski boarded a plane on a one-way ticket to this industrial capital city.

China's trade surplus widened in October as export growth accelerated, the latest encouraging sign for the world's second-largest economy.

Europe's economy is still reeling and unemployment could remain high for years despite the progress made in solving the debt crisis, the European Union warned Wednesday, as it downgraded next year's forecasts for the 27-country bloc.

Here's the assignment President Barack Obama has won with his re-election: Improve an economy burdened by high unemployment, stagnant pay, a European financial crisis, slowing global growth and U.S. companies still too anxious to expand much.

French industrialist Louis Gallois called for a patriotic effort to reverse declining competitiveness through shock therapy as he handed in a review on Monday which the Socialist government commissioned and is now under pressure to heed.

A sign taped to a wall in an Athens hospital appealed for civility from patients. "The doctors on duty have been unpaid since May," it read, "Please respect their work." Patients and their relatives glanced up briefly and moved on, hardened to such messages of gloom. In a country where about 1,000 people lose their jobs each day, legions more are still employed but haven't seen a paycheck in months. What used to be an anomaly has become commonplace, and those who have jobs that pay on time consider themselves the exception to the rule.