Earlier this month Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s flagship airline carrier and the world’s largest international cargo airline, announced a HK$39bn bailout plan as part of an unprecedented government-led rescue deal to help the company withstand further downturn in the coming months.
UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has said in an op-ed in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that he will offer around 3m Hong Kong residents a chance to move to the UK to seek refuge if China implements its national security law.
The French government has just injected more than €8 bn into its car industry (of which €5 bn is a loan to Renault) to keep it afloat amid the losses it has suffered as a result of COVID-19. One goal of this cash injection is to support production of 1m electric cars in France by 2025.
China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) announced that it would introduce a national security law on Hong Kong, banning any act that endangers China’s national security, including subversion, separatism, terrorism and foreign interference. The decision caused Hong Kong’s main stock index to tumble by 5.6%.
UberEats announced it will stop operating in the United Arab Emirates (“UAE”) after 4 June 2020 and will combine its services with CareemNOW, the online food delivery service operated by Middle Eastern ride hailing company Careem, which Uber acquired in 2019 for £2.4bn.
The ongoing global coronavirus crisis has not only created an economic crisis in Europe but also laid bare the political and constitutional difficulties facing the union.
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as part of a series of austerity measures, has increased VAT from 5% to 15%
With the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, the US has spent millions of dollars on experimental vaccines, even though they are yet to pass testing stages.
According to African economic thinktank NKC African Economics, Africa will soon feel a knock to economic growth, with GDP growth shaved from 3.8% to 2.8% following the first wave of reported COVID-19 cases announced in early March.
Large state-owned Chinese banks, like the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and the Bank of China (BOC), must brace themselves for an incoming wave of bad debt from smaller Chinese businesses and banks.