BREWED BEHAVIOUR
Lifestyle, Fitness, Health, and more.
The Room Turned in a Week
Last week, more than two-thirds of economists polled by Reuters expected the Federal Reserve to leave rates alone at the September meeting. This week, 86 of 101 economists surveyed after Friday's inflation report, an 85 percent majority, expect a quarter-point increase to 3.75 to 4.00 percent. Fed funds futures put the probability around ninety percent, and CME's FedWatch tool has since moved above that. It would be the first increase since...
Withdrawing the Word Temporary
Christine Lagarde gave an interview to Ouest-France, published on 13 September, in which she said the current shock is longer-lasting, and that there has been a major shock that will probably last longer than we had expected. She was specific about why. The war in Iran, and what she called the destruction of refining capacity around the world, especially in Russia. Those have raised energy costs, and energy costs drive all other prices. In that...
The Meeting That Keeps Not Happening
Oman was due to host a meeting on Monday between Iran and the Gulf states, to discuss reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war it carried around twenty percent of the world's oil exports and it has been largely closed since the end of February. The meeting was postponed overnight. Iran said the postponement came at Saudi Arabia's request. On the same day, the Houthis said they fired dozens of missiles and drones at a military airbase at...
Nobody Trades at Six on a Sunday
Researchers at Delft and Eindhoven ran six focus groups with twenty-six employees in the Netherlands who regularly experience low mood in anticipation of the working week, having first asked them to keep diaries about their Sundays. The results were published in Frontiers in Psychology at the start of this month, and the tabloid version of the finding put the peak at seven in the evening. The study itself is careful about what it is: a...
The Town That Goes Home at Six
More students are choosing to live at home while studying, and universities are adapting their courses and campuses to suit them. The Guardian spoke to several this weekend, and the detail in their accounts is more instructive than the trend itself. Lucy Brazier, a second-year business management student, lives near Colchester and commutes to the University of Essex. She calls it the obvious choice for her course once she weighed the costs, and...