1 Brazil emerges from recession (BBC) Brazil's
economy has grown 1% in the first three months of 2017, putting an end to the
country's longest recession in history, officials have announced. The GDP
increase came after two consecutive years of negative growth, during which the
Brazilian economy shrank by almost 8%.
A record harvest of soybeans, one of Brazil's main
exports, gave the economy a boost. But analysts warned Brazil could go back
into recession in the near future. A record 14 million people are unemployed
according to official figures released earlier this week.
Uncertainty over the future of President Michel Temer
has also rattled the markets. Stock markets plummeted last month after a taped
conversation was leaked in which the president seemed to discuss the payment of
hush money to a jailed politician. Mr Temer has denied the allegations.
2 Jeff Bezos, the world’s next richest man (Graham
Ruddick in The Guardian) Just a few dollars more on the Amazon share price and
the world will have a new richest man. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, is on
the brink of overtaking Bill Gates to become the wealthiest person on the
planet.
Bezos, 53, has been having a very good year. His net
worth has risen by almost $20bn (£16bn) in the past five months to $85.2bn,
putting him just behind Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is valued at
$89.3bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The man who changed the way we shop is not a
johnny-come-lately internet billionaire. Amazon was founded in 1994, when
people still referred to the web as the information superhighway. But it is now
the fourth most valuable company in the world behind Microsoft, Google’s parent
company, Alphabet, and Apple.
The business began with Bezos selling books from his
garage in Seattle. Since then, Amazon has expanded into other retail
categories, such as food, clothing and electricals, and developed a formidable
cloud computing service, its own television shows and an electronic personal
assistant for people’s homes.
Bezos has repeatedly told shareholders, analysts and
staff that it is still “day one” for the company, despite the fact that it
accounts for 43% of all online sales in the US, and his office at Amazon’s
headquarters is located in a building called “day one”. The best way to protect
the company, he said, is “obsessive customer focus”.
Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen to
Jorgensen and Jackie Gise, who married as teenagers. Gise filed for divorce
from Jorgensen when Bezos was 17 months old. In 1968, she married Miguel Bezos,
who legally adopted Bezos as his son. Gise asked Jorgensen to stay out of their
lives. In an interview in 2014, Jorgensen said he was desperate to see his
biological son, but Bezos had not been in contact.
3 India looks to GST for a lift (Khaleej Times) India's
economy should get a lift from the launch of a new sales tax, Finance Minister
Arun Jaitley has said, putting a brave face on a slowdown in growth that
followed a government crackdown on "black money". Jaitley's comments
came after data showed that annual economic growth unexpectedly slipped to 6.1
per cent in the January-March quarter, its lowest in more than two years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's shock decision last
November to outlaw high value old banknotes took 86 per cent of currency out of
circulation virtually overnight. Asia's third-largest economy had clocked
annual 7.5 per cent growth in July-September before Modi removed the oxygen of
cash.
Economic expansion in the latest quarter, lower than
China's 6.9 per cent, was hurt by a slowdown in farming, manufacturing and
services. Construction activity contracted from a year earlier. The biggest
disappointment was a sharp fall in capital investments.
Saddled with $150 billion of sour debts, banks have
been slow to grant loans, especially to businesses perceived as riskier. Jaitley
said the planned July 1 launch of a new Goods and Services Tax (GST) would
boost economic growth and the government was "in a state of
preparedness" for the rollout.
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