Economy, Global Recession | featured news

Britain skirted a "triple dip" recession by growing faster than expected in the first three months of the year, providing some cover for a government under fire over its austerity drive.

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 Olympics brought less tourist money to recession-hit Britain than officials expected, a trade group said Monday, with a majority of tourist businesses reporting losses from last year.

For a country that’s faced the worst economic recession in a generation, the U.S. is doing marvelously well by comparison to every major economy except for maybe China. GDP growth, still around 2 percent and expected to end the year close to that, is better in the U.S. than it is in Brazil, a country which grew China-style in 2010 at 7.5 percent. Once the shining start of the Latin American economies, Brazil is now at stall speed.

Taiwan snapped two straight quarters of contraction, but an uncertain outlook for its major trading partners prompted Taipei to revise growth forecasts for the year.

Chinese factories battled with their weakest activity in 32 months in November, a preliminary purchasing managers' survey showed, reviving worries that China may be skidding toward an economic hard landing and compounding global recession fears.

Europe is caught in an economic pincer: slow-growth assaults from one side; fickle financial markets from the other. One obvious way out — the China option — seems barred by geopolitics. There is precedent. Historians blame the Great Depression’s severity in part on poor international cooperation. Economist Charles Kindleberger found a vacuum of power: Great Britain, the old economic leader, could no longer lead alone; and the United States — a replacement — wasn’t ready to help. Is there a parallel today between the United States and China? Are we repeating the mistakes of the 1930s? Unsettling questions.

The United States and China piled pressure on Europe on Saturday to get to grips with its debt crisis before it risks causing bank runs and pushing the global economy into ruinous recession.

Stocks tumbled on Thursday, extending losses for a fourth straight session, as the Federal Reserve's weak outlook for the U.S. economy and disappointing data from China heightened fears about a global recession.

Portugal will elect a new government on Sunday which will lead the country through a period of deep austerity and recession after it received a 78-billion-euro ($114 billion) bailout from the European Union and IMF.