MasterCard reported that the volume of holiday retail sales in the US grew by 4.9% in 2017 compared to the previous year. This dynamic is a record since 2011. The growth in sales was marked by a record number of announcements about closure of traditional retail stores. Experts note that this is a natural trend in recent years. Now, the consumers prefer online shopping to traditional shopping...

Saudi Aramco, the state company of Saudi Arabia, is looking for opportunities to conclude a deal with a company working on shale deposits in the United States. If successful, this will be the country’s first international investment in the oil and gas sector. Saudi Aramco held preliminary talks about the share in the Tellurian Houston company, which is liquefying natural gas, or buying LNG from...

A team, headed by the analyst of US investment bank Morgan Stanley James Fawcett, sent out a note to the bank’s clients a few days ago, stating that the real cost of Bitcoin, the most popular crypto currency in the world, is zero. According to The Business Insider, the document emphasizes that it is practically impossible to reason the real price of the most popular crypto currency at the moment....

The end of the year is the time to sum up and make forecasts for the next year. This concerns, among other things, the energy and the oil markets. As a rule, experts make various forecasts at the end of the year concerning such aspects as OPEC policy, energy consumption, raw material prices, car sales in China. However, only a small part of them do come true. Therefore, many analysts believe that...

They say that diamonds are forever. Yet, they can also be very expensive. On December 5, 173 lots of jewelry, auctioned at Sotheby's, were sold for $ 54 million. Among them were jewels of the famous English actor Sean Connery, the performer of the James Bond role. The next day, the favorite car of Agent 007 - Aston Martin DB5 - was put up for sale for $ 2.7 million. It was one of 24 vintage cars...

The new crypto currency Bitkoin has risen more than tenfold in 2017. In December its rate has overcome a record mark of 18 000 dollars. At the same time, virtual money is increasingly being criticized. Many call them "dirty", because you need huge amounts of electricity to mine bitcoins. According to experts of Digiconomist analytical online resource, about 32 terawatt hours are spent annually...

Economic nationalism is spreading in the countries of the European Union. As a consequence, the union’s members are now paying less attention to the rules of the single market. The single market, created in 1993, has not actually become truly united, but now actions of the authorities of individual EU countries are increasingly undermining its principles. These countries are introducing their own...

The International Energy Agency (IEA) raised the forecast for oil demand by 0.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 and 2018, that is, to 97.8 million bpd and 99.1 million bpd, respectively. At the same time, the agency kept the forecast for growth in demand unchanged: it will increase by 1.5 million bpd, or 1.6%, in 2017 and 1.3 million bpd, or 1.3%, in 2018, says the IEA’s December report. In...

The ability to compare prices on the Internet hinders the acceleration of inflation. Thanks to smartphones, consumers can now easily compare prices on the Internet. But this prevents prices from rising and inflation – from accelerating to a target of about 2% in the US and other developed countries. Therefore, their central banks, in particular the US Federal Reserve System (FRS), find it...