A closely watched survey shows that economic growth across the 19-country eurozone was even higher than previously thought during June, more evidence of growing momentum in the single currency bloc.

Financial information firm IHS Markit says its main purchasing managers’ index, which surveys both the manufacturing and services sectors, was at 56.3 points in June. Though that is slightly down on the previous month’s 56.8, it’s well ahead of the previous estimate of 55.7. Anything above 50 indicates expansion.

The average reading over the second quarter was 56.6, the best outcome since the first quarter of 2011. That, according to the firm, indicates healthy quarterly growth of 0.7 percent.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the survey is that it’s broad-based and not just isolated to Europe’s biggest economy, Germany.
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As police step up patrols and protesters set up camp in Hamburg, Germany, no one is expecting an easy weekend when U.S. President Donald Trump joins other heads of the world’s 20 leading economies.

Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are on a collision course on issues of climate and trade, but counterterrorism efforts, recent North Korean missile tests and Chinese steel dumping could bring them together.

Merkel pledges to work toward consensus on wider issues, but foresees no miracles in her relations with the U.S. administration.

“I do not think we will have unified positions on all issues at the end, but it is sensible and honest to talk to each other on all issues of international diplomacy,” Merkel told reporters ahead of the summit.

WATCH: Preview of G-20 meeting

President Trump said he has “bold” plans to impose steep tariffs or quotas on steel imports, the latest and perhaps most serious of threats to protect U.S. industry, and part of his America First strategy, one that has G-20 partners feeling nervous.

“What he is doing is he is throwing all kinds of cards up in the air — NAFTA, critique of climate change — because he actually wants a bit of a zero base policy,” said Tim Evans, a political economist at Middlesex University. “I think at the end of the day he probably, of course, wants free trade in the win-win sense, but what he is trying to expose is perhaps some of the hypocrisy of countries like China who talk the talk of openness but do not always deliver. So there is going to be a real clash of the titans at this summit.”

Shock talk brings results

After threatening to not stand by NATO allies unless they pay their share of defense, members pledged to boost their contributions. Trump said he would rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and now he has a deal with Mexico on sugar exports.

The U.S. leader’s target now is China and its cheap steel exports that are blamed for killing jobs not only in the United States, but in Britain and other G-20 states, including Germany.

Chinese officials are closely watching the direction of U.S. policy and have called on Washington to exercise caution.

Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord has stoked the anger of demonstrators in Hamburg as well as concern among Merkel and some other G-20 leaders, but analysts say the threat of cheap Chinese steel imports could be a common cause, and take precedence.

“Many of the G-20 members are experiencing exactly the same kinds of economic forces and constraints the U.S. is facing,” Shanker Singham, director of economic policy and prosperity studies at the Legatum Institute in London, told VOA. “So for example, in the U.K., the steel mills in Port Talbot and Redcar were closed because of, really, overcapacity of supply by the China steel sector. That is not very much different from what has been going on in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So I think this actually has the opportunity or a chance to get a lot of support.”

Wait-and-see approach

G-20 leaders, while nervous, are waiting to see what Trump actually does before taking any action, and all indications are that they are not rushing to adopt protectionist measures.

Global Trade Alert, a group that monitors protectionism, this week reported a drop in the number of such measures adopted by G-20 members in the last several months compared with the same period last year.

“The Trump administration has said a lot about ‘America First’ and fair trade and so forth, but they haven’t actually done that much so far,” said Singham. “G-20 members will be looking at ‘What do you really mean by this policy?’ in order to determine what their response to that policy will be.”

None of the major issues is likely to be resolved, but analysts say more clarity may emerge, given who the players are.

“The landscape that we see looming in Hamburg is one of showmanship,” said Evans. ”We have a lot of unpredictability because we have a lot of very charismatic, very outspoken leaders — people like [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan from Turkey, [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi from India, Vladimir Putin from Russia and of course President Trump. These people know how to play to global audiences.”
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Наступний транш позики від Міжнародного валютного фонду для України буде відкладений через те, що парламент не встигне ухвалити всі необхідні реформи до літніх канікулів, заявив прем’єр-міністр України Володимир Гройсман.

Як сказав він у понеділок в інтерв’ю агентству Bloomberg, що було оприлюднене у вівторок, пенсійна реформа йде за графіком, кроки для створення антикорупційного суду вживаються, а от законопроект про земельну реформу не буде поданий вчасно. Це затримає виплату п’ятого траншу на суму в 1 мільярд 900 мільйонів доларів із загальної суми позики в 17,5 мільярдів доларів.

Але, мовиться в інтерв’ю, Гройсман запевнив, що уряд і далі відданий виконанню програми співпраці з МВФ. І хоча земельну реформу не встигнуть ухвалити до літніх канікулів, її, можливо, ухвалять до кінця року. «Ми працюємо над реформами, і п’ятий транш урешті надійде», – сказав Гройсман.

За його словами, це не МВФ потрібні реформи в Україні – вони потрібні самій Україні, і програму МВФ треба виконати повністю – «це наше завдання», сказав Гройсман.

Виплата п’ятого траншу спершу планувалася на червень чи липень, нагадує агентство.

У матеріалі нагадано, що зняттю заборони на продаж сільськогосподарських земель чинять спротив популісти в парламенті, які твердять, що влада і підприємці обдурять селян і захоплять територію.

Президент України Петро Порошенко обговорював співпрацю Києва й МВФ у перебігу свого візиту до Вашингтона 20 червня.

У квітні 2017 року МВФ надав Україні попередній транш на 1 мільярд доларів.

У березні 2015 року між МВФ і Україною була затверджена чотирирічна програма розширеного фінансування на суму близько 17,5 мільярдів доларів США. Наразі МВФ надав Україні за цією програмою близько 8 мільярдів 380 мільйонів доларів. Метою програми є відновлення економіки України, відновлення її незалежності від зовнішніх джерел, зміцнення державних фінансів, утримання фінансової стабільності і підтримка економічного зростання шляхом структурних і управлінських реформ за одночасного захисту найменш вразливих верств.
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Electric car maker Tesla says its much-ballyhooed Model 3 car for the masses will go on sale on Friday.

CEO Elon Musk made the announcement Monday on Twitter.

The car is to start around $35,000 and with a $7,500 federal electric car tax credit, could cost $27,500. Tesla says the five-seat car will be able to go 215 miles (133 kilometers) on a single charge and will be sporty, accelerating from zero to 60 miles per hour in under six seconds.

Musk had said that production was on track to start in July, but Tesla has often faced delays in getting vehicles to market. The Palo Alto, California-based company aims to make 5,000 Model 3 sedans per week by the end of this year and 10,000 per week in 2018.

Tesla hasn’t said how many people have put down $1,000 refundable deposits for the Model 3, but Musk has said people who put down a deposit now won’t get a car until the end of 2018, suggesting it could be close to 500,000.

Whether Tesla can meet its production goals is an open question. Its last new vehicle, the Model X SUV, was delayed nearly 18 months. Musk says the Model 3 is much simpler to make, but 14-year-old Tesla has no experience producing and selling vehicles in high volumes. Tesla made just 84,000 cars last year. Bigger rivals like General Motors, Volkswagen and Toyota routinely sell around 10 million vehicles per year.

Even if the Model 3 is on time, servicing all those vehicles will still be a challenge. Model S and Model X owners are already worried about having to share Tesla’s company-owned charging stations with an influx of new cars. And while Tesla is promising to increase its network of stores and service centers by 30 percent this year, it began 2017 with just 250 service centers worldwide. That leaves many potential owners miles from a service center.

Musk has said a new fleet of mobile service trucks will be deployed to help customers who are far from service centers. Tesla also plans to double its global high-speed charging points to 10,000 by the end of this year and increase them by another 50 percent-100 percent in 2018.

Until recently, Tesla owned the market for fully-electric vehicles that can go 200 miles (324 kilometers) or more on a charge. But that’s changing. GM beat Tesla to the mass market with the Chevrolet Bolt, a $36,000 car that goes 238 miles (about 200 kilometers) per charge. Audi plans to introduce an electric SUV with 300 miles (486 kilometers) of range next year; Ford will have one by 2020. Volkswagen plans more than 30 electric vehicle models by 2025.

Automotive competitors like Mercedes and Volvo – not to mention tech companies like Google and Uber – can also match Tesla’s efforts to develop self-driving vehicles. And they have deeper pockets. Tesla has had only two profitable quarters in its seven years as a public company.
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For committed vegetarian Jay Wilde, taking over his father’s central England beef farm in 2011 gave rise to a significant ethical dilemma: how could he continue running his family business, while adhering to his principles?

This year, Wilde took an unusual decision to resolve that conflict: he donated his Derbyshire farm’s herd of 63 cattle, which would have fetched £45,000 pounds ($58,250) if sold for meat, to an animal sanctuary.

“It just seemed difficult to look after the animals for two to three years and get to really know them, and then send them to slaughter. It felt as if you were betraying them”, Wilde told the BBC.

Wilde believes that his cows have emotions and can sense when they’re going to be killed. After donating the herd, Wilde said that he plans to refocus his farm on growing organic vegetables and field crops without any animal inputs.

The herd now resides at the Hillside Animal Sanctuary near Frettenham, where they will live out the remainder of their lives, effectively as pets.

While Wilde accepted that his new farm may be less profitable, his principal desire was for his animals to be happy.

“I hope that when they arrive at the refuge the cows will run down the ramp of the truck into the field and think ‘wow! We’ve come on holiday'”, he said.
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The politically isolated Gulf nation of Qatar says it plans to boost production of liquefied natural gas by 30 percent over the coming years.

State-run Qatar Petroleum made the announcement in the capital, Doha on Tuesday, a day after Qatar handed over its response to a list of demands by Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia that have cut ties with their tiny neighbor.

QP President and CEO Saad Sherida al-Kaabi said the production increase stems from a decision to double anticipated output from a new gas project on the southern portion of its vast underwater North Field.

The increase will over time give Qatar the capacity to produce 100 million tons of liquefied natural gas per year, up from 77 million.
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Renewables are a fast-growing part of the energy that powers the United States, but a government report shows fossil fuels still provide energy for most of the economy.

The Energy Information Administration says petroleum, natural gas, and coal provided 81 percent of the energy for the world’s largest economy in 2016.

That is lowest rate of U.S. fossil fuel use in a century, and the change is partly due to a major fall in coal usage to generate electricity. In many cases, coal has been replaced by less-polluting natural gas or zero-emission technologies like solar and wind generation.

An earlier EIA report says renewable energy sources account for most of the new electric generating capacity, with perhaps 24 gigawatts added in the United States during 2016.

In the meantime, markets are pondering efforts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to limit output and boost prices. The oil price is down around 14 percent this year due to output from the United States, Nigeria, Libya and some other nations.

 
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Feted by some British newspapers as proof of a Brexit vote windfall, Britain’s recent export recovery ranks as the worst among Europe’s major economies, according to one closely-watched measure.

Surveys of manufacturers across Europe published by data firm IHS Markit on Monday underlined Britain’s challenge as it tries to become an export-led dynamo outside the European Union.

The export orders gauge of the UK Markit/CIPS Purchasing Managers’ Index slid to a five-month low in June.

While still indicating growth in exports, it left Britain as the weakest performer in terms of foreign orders, barring Greece, among big western European economies for a fourth month running.

That’s a poor return for the pound’s 12 percent fall against a range of currencies since the Brexit vote a year ago.

It also casts doubt over the belief among some Bank of England officials that strong exports will help make up for a slowdown in consumer spending, suggesting the British economy could cope with a first interest rate hike in a decade.

“Sterling’s depreciation has been the least successful in Britain’s post-war history,” said Samuel Tombs, economist at consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics consultancy.

Since sterling began to fall at the end of 2015, net trade has dragged on the economy, unlike after earlier sharp falls in the exchange rate in 1967, 1975, 1992 and 2007/08, Tombs said.

Some indicators have suggested exporters are doing well.

The Confederation of British Industry’s gauge of manufacturing exports, which is based on a different methodology to the PMIs, hit a 22-year high in June.

But the official data is more muted: goods trade export volumes rose at an annual rate of 5.3 percent in the three months to April, the best showing since January 2016 but still below rates seen through most of 2015.

As well as putting Britain’s export recovery into context, the latest figures suggest Britain’s plan to become an export-led “champion of free trade” — as trade minister Liam Fox put it — is not entirely in its own hands.

Its success will hinge just as much on how well its competitors fare in winning business in the same markets and, on that score, the euro zone is showing its muscle.

“I think that is a reflection of the euro area, in terms of them winning global trade gains due to the weak euro,” Chris Williamson, chief business economist at IHS Markit, said.

The euro is 17 percent weaker against the U.S. dollar than at the end of 2014, despite a recent rally.

Part of the underperformance of British exporters in relation to the euro zone may reflect the fact that they have hiked selling prices faster, to help recoup rising energy and imported material costs exacerbated by the weak pound.

While the euro zone’s export price index rose 2.7 percent between the third quarter of last year and the first quarter of 2017, Britain’s increased more than 8 percent.

Increased volatility in sterling, which historically has been more stable than the euro against the dollar, might also be weighing on potential buyers of British goods.

“It’s not so much that the UK is doing badly, it’s just that the euro zone is doing very well at the same time,” said Williamson.
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A global Danish transport and logistics company says it has restored most of its information technology systems after experiencing a major cyberattack last week that affected companies and government agencies in more than 60 countries.

A.P. Moller-Maersk says it resumed container deliveries at its major ports Monday, but said it may take another week to restore all computer functions.

The cyberattack that hit the world’s biggest container shipping line also affected U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck, FedEx subsidiary TNT, London based international law firm DLA Piper, and Kyiv’s Oschadbank,

Ukrainian authorities have blamed Russia for masterminding the attack.  Russia denies the charge.

Ukraine has repeatedly come under fire from high-powered cyberattacks tied to Moscow, but several independent experts say it is too early, based on what is publicly known, to come to a firm conclusion about who is responsible for this attack.

The hackers encrypted data on infected machines and demanded a ransom to give it back to its owner.  Some researchers question the motivation behind the attack, saying it may not have been designed to collect a ransom, but instead to simply destroy data.

Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab says the code used in the hacking software would not have allowed its authors to decrypt the stolen data even after a ransom had been paid.

The computer virus used in the attack includes code known as “Eternal Blue”, a tool developed by the U.S. National Security Agency that exploited Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and which was published on the internet in April by a group called Shadowbrokers.  Microsoft released a patch in March to protect systems from that vulnerability.

The attack bore resemblance to the previous “WannaCry” hack, that sent a wave of crippling ransomware to hospitals across Britain in May, causing the hospitals to divert ambulances and cancel surgeries.  The program demanded a ransom to unlock access to files stored on infected machines.

Researchers eventually found a way to thwart the hack, but only after about 300 people had paid the ransom.

Last week, Tim Rawlins, the director of the Britain-based cybersecurity consulting firm NCC Group, told VOA the attacks continue to happen because people have not been keeping up with effectively patching their computers.

“This is a repeat WannaCry type of outbreak and it really comes down to the fact that people are not focusing on what they should be focusing on, the very simple premise of patching your systems,” Rawlins said.

 
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У Національному банку України заявляють, що громадянин Білорусі і Республіки Кіпр Віктор Прокопеня подав пакет документів для погодження опосередкованого (через білоруський ВАТ «Паритетбанк») придбання 100% акцій української «дочки» «Сбербанку».

Як повідомили Радіо Свобода у прес-службі НБУ, ці документи, подані 30 червня, вже зареєстровані і опрацьовуються. 

У прес-службі нагадали, що, відповідно до чинного законодавства, Нацбанк розглядає такі документи протягом трьох місяців, під час розгляду НБУ перевіряє відповідність ділової репутації інвестора вимогам, встановленим у нормативно-правових актах, його фінансовий стан і джерела походження коштів.

У квітні Нацбанк повідомляв про отримання документів на погодження продажу «Сбербанку». Документи надійшли від громадянина Великої Британії й Росії Саїда Гуцерієва, який має намір придбати 77,5% акцій фінустанови.

Національний банк України за рішенням Ради національної безпеки і оборони застосував від 23 березня санкції стосовно дочірніх компаній російських державних банків, які працюють в Україні, зокрема і щодо «Сбербанку».

Після цього рішення стало відомо, що найбільший у Росії комерційний банк «Сбербанк», підконтрольний державі, розглядає варіанти якнайшвидшого виходу з українського ринку. 27 березня російський «Сбербанк» повідомив про продаж своїх філій в Україні.

З січня цього року представники «Національного корпусу» вимагали припинення діяльності російських підприємств в Україні, зокрема і «Сбербанку».
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Національний банк України заявляє, що строк добровільної реструктуризації кредитів колишніх власників «Приватбанку» сплив 1 липня 2017 року. Про це йдеться у повідомленні регулятора 3 липня.

«Зараз можна стверджувати, що колишні власники банку не виконали взяті на себе зобов’язання», – повідомляє НБУ.

«Таким чином, зараз держава та «Приватбанк» перейшли до юридичної процедури стягнення та реалізації відповідної юридичної стратегії, конкретні кроки якої наразі не можуть бути розголошені», – йдеться у повідомленні.

21 грудня минулого року «Приватбанк» перейшов у державну власність.

Упродовж червня бізнесмен Ігор Коломойський подав до суду низку позовів, направлених проти уряду, НБУ та «Приватбанку».
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