The World Bank boosted its 2024 global growth forecast slightly, bringing it to 2.6%. Most of the improvement stems from its rosier view of the US growth outlook, which it raised by almost a full percentage point to 2.5%. However, the group kept its 2025 global growth estimate steady at 2.7%, and warned that climate change, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and high debt levels will hurt poorer countries, where most people live. Forecasters are expecting a rough hurricane season, prompting insurers to protect themselves by issuing more catastrophe bonds – securities that transfer some or all of the natural disaster risk to investors. Insurers issued 38% more “cat” bonds in the first five months of 2024 compared to the same period last year, hitting a record $11.7 billion. What’s more, the $4 billion issued in May alone represents the greatest volume of the bonds ever sold in a single month. The annual pace of US inflation ticked down slightly last month to 3.3%, defying economist expectations for an unchanged reading. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy items to give a better idea of underlying price pressures, fell by slightly more than forecast to 3.4% – a three-year low. While the report offers the Federal Reserve (the Fed) some hope that high interest rates are helping to bring inflation down toward its 2% target, officials will probably want to see a further fall before they start cutting borrowing costs. Speaking of the Fed, the US central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged at a two-decade high for a seventh straight meeting this week. And policymakers signaled that they now expect to cut rates just once this year – not the three times they were forecasting back in March. They now see four cuts in 2025, instead of three. The Fed also upped its inflation forecast slightly for 2024 but kept its economic growth projection unchanged. As any Brit could tell you, April was unusually rainy in the UK. The month was one of the wettest on record, and that hit the retail and construction sectors so badly that the UK economy completely flatlined. In other words, it saw zero growth in April, and that big slowdown from March’s 0.4% expansion now has folks worrying that the rebound from last year’s recession may have lost all momentum. | 