Category: Economic News

If you or your business happens to receive a call from the IRS asking for money, it’s recommended that you immediately end the call. Recently, con artists have been attempting to trick people and businesses by posing as the IRS and claiming to be owed money.

It’s important to recognise this scam straight away if you are targeted by it. This can be done by not acknowledging someone asking for money over the phone. If this happens to you or someone in your business, end the call. It’s also important to be extra cautious if you receive a call from a credit card company, or any other company that requires personal identification information for any reason.

To help combat this issue the IRS have set up a black list to record various common scams. This goes beyond fraudulent phone calls, recording scams such as ID theft, fake charities soliciting donations and more.

While the overall economic news for the UK in 2014 was good, the final quarter showed evidence that the economy may be slowing, with the growth rate reducing to 0.5% between October and December.

Looking more closely at the details of growth, we see that the services industry is still going strong, but that the mining, construction and production industries have slowed, and in the cases of construction and production, both have actually shrank. This doesn’t bode well for the conservative economic platform and their goals, as they were aiming for an economic shift away from a consumer driven economy to a more productive one, and the results of the last quarter seem to suggest that the opposite has occurred.

Whether or not this loss of momentum is indicative of a continuing slow-down in our economy is still up for debate, but with the negative factors influencing our economy expected to persist, the outlook still isn’t totally positive.

The oil price is made by a complex combination of factors which influence the price. The overarching factor is of supply and demand; that basic market principle. Due to the economic engine of china slowing down over recent years, demand for oil has decreased massively, with most economists arguing that that decrease in demand is largely responsible for the drop in oil prices. Alternatively, or at least a contributing factor, is the change in strategy within OPEC, with them increasing production of oil to keep the price low.

OPEC is the abbreviation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which consists of countries from the middle east, with the exception of Venezuela. Saudi Arabia’s oil minister has been on record saying that OPEC is in agreement on oil production policy, and that they will not decrease production in order to keep the prices high. When asked for the reason why, he said “Whether it goes down to $20, $40, $50, $60, it is irrelevant,”, arguing that lower costs means good things for the global economy.

Other people contend that their reason for this policy is less altruistic, and instead is a means through which they can reduce the production in the USA by making the costs of extraction there too high to turn a profit.

As most people now know, oil prices have recently fallen to the lowest price since 2009. This change has many effects on the global economy, and while most people would assume they would be good changes, the truth is that it is a largely mixed bag of positives and negatives.

Falling oil prices has a largely positive impact on consumers of oil around the world, but as the oil market is such a large part of the global marketplace, the detriment it causes to producers of oil can have a negative effect on everyone.

If you take the USA as one example and Russia as another; the USA has re-emerged as a global producer of oil, but what they’ve been contributing to the market place has above average costs when it comes to the extraction, which only made sense to extract due to the high oil price; Russia is the place which is perhaps the hardest hit by the fall in oil price, as one of the biggest global contributors of oil, and it playing such as massive role in the country’s economy, balancing the nation’s books with such a massive decrease in revenue could be disastrous.

The damage such a decrease in oil price could cause to these two nations and countries in OPEC could end up hurting everybody, so although having low costs at the pump is good for consumers, the end result could be bad for them.