Early Headlines: S&P Downgrades Greece, 10% of S&P 500 Avoid Paying Taxes, Bad News about Greece and More

Early Bird Headlines 16 April 2015

Econintersect: Here are some of the headlines we found to help you start your day. For more headlines see our afternoon feature for GEI members, What We Read Today, which has many more headlines and a number of article discussions to keep you abreast of what we have found interesting.

Global

IMF 2015 Forecast – China largest contributor to global GDP growth (Brendan Ahern, KraneShares, LinkedIn) A good summary review of the 2015 IMF forecast.

Asia stocks follow global surge, dollar on defensive (Reuters)

The island where people forget to die (CNN) There are pockets of people around the world that live much longer, healthier lives that the rest of the planet.

U.S.

Why Oil And Gas Explorers And Producers May Have Finally Bottomed (Trang Ho, Forbes) Trang Ho has contributed to GEI.

Sharing-economy jobs make taxes uber-complicated (Reuters)

Ten Percent of S&P 500 Companies Avoid Paying U.S. Taxes (Bloomberg) The number has doubled in the last six years.

UK

State of the Nation: welfare shifts towards the working poor (The Conversation)

Greece

S&P cuts Greece rating, outlook ‘negative’ (CNBC) Hat tip to Marvin Clark. Wednesday Standard & Poor’s cut Greece’s credit rating from “CCC+” from “B-” with a negative outlook, saying it expected Greece’s debt to be “unsustainable.” Only two levels of rating left above “D” which is for default.

Germans downbeat on chances of Greek deal next week (Reuters) German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble said that Greece’s new leftist-led government had “destroyed” all the economic improvements achieved by Athens since 2011 that no one expected a deal at the upcoming Riga meeting or in the coming weeks.

Italy

Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet (The New York Times) Luciano Faggiano’s search for a sewage pipe exposed a subterranean world tracing back before the birth of Jesus: a Messapian tomb, a Roman granary, a Franciscan chapel and even etchings from the Knights Templar. He started in 2000 and he’s still digging.

Nigeria

Nigeria’s ex-soldier president will learn that peace comes from full bellies not the barrel of a gun (The Conversation)

China

The end of an era for China (BBC News) China’s growth drivers are changing. Consumption now contributes more to GDP than does investment. That is a new thing and what the government has been working toward.

Economists are blind to China’s hard landing (Macro Business) China is very deliberately slowing structurally. Stimulus is being rolled out only to maintain the glide slope to lower and less debt-driven (and commodity intensive) growth, as well as towards productivity and consumption led drivers. “For once, a group of sovereign macro managers are doing exactly what they should. It is no surprise that the can-kicking, trend line economists that have sunk Western economies are so blind to it.” (Econintersect added emphasis.)

Brazil

Brazil Petrobras scandal: Workers’ Party treasurer Vaccari steps down (BBC News)

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