Canada’s economy lost momentum after a strong start to the year and is tracking below the central bank’s latest forecast, supporting expectations a first cut to interest rates could come before summer, the Wall Street Journal reported. Preliminary data suggest gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services produced across the economy, was essentially unchanged in March, Statistics Canada said Tuesday. That follows 0.2% growth in February GDP from the month before to 2.218 trillion Canadian dollars, the equivalent of $1.624 trillion.

Mexico's economy grew 0.2% in the first quarter compared to the previous three-month period, a preliminary estimate from the national statistics agency showed on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Compared with the same quarter a year earlier, the economy grew 1.6%, the statistics agency said. Read more.

Laurentian University's board of governors has approved a budget of just over $201.7 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year with $8 million being set aside to enact recommendations to bring the university up to modern operating standards following its insolvency, CBC.ca reported. The university declared insolvency in February 2021; the first public post-secondary institution to choose federal legislation meant to restructure commercial enterprises in financial crisis. As a result of restructuring, 69 undergraduate and graduate programs and 195 faculty positions were cut at Laurentian.

Bank of Canada officials said monetary policy easing is expected to be “gradual,” as they debate the timing of a pivot to rate cuts, Bloomberg News reported.

Canadian consumers haven’t tightened their belts this much in nearly a year, and there are no signs of spending growth since the start of 2024, Bloomberg News reported. Receipts for retailers were unchanged in March, according to an advance estimate from Statistics Canada released Wednesday. That followed a 0.1% drop in February. Taken together with the 0.3% plunge in January sales, the figures point to a flat reading in the first three months of the year, the weakest pace since the second quarter of 2023.

Mexico’s annual inflation shot past forecasts in the first half of April, likely cementing a rate hold at the central bank’s May monetary policy meeting, Bloomberg News reported. Official data released Wednesday showed consumer prices rose 4.63% from a year before, above all estimates in a Bloomberg survey that had a 4.51% median forecast. Core inflation, which excludes volatile items like food and fuel, slowed to 4.39%. Stubborn price pressures have made it more difficult for analysts to predict whether policymakers’ March interest rate reduction was the beginning of continuous easing.

The U.S. is drafting sanctions that threaten to cut some Chinese banks off from the global financial system, arming Washington’s top envoy with diplomatic leverage that officials hope will stop Beijing’s commercial support of Russia’s military production, the Wall Street Journal reported. But as Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Beijing on Tuesday, the question is whether even the threat of the U.S.

With Imperial Pacific International (CNMI) LLC’s filing of chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in federal court on Friday, it stops Commonwealth Casino Commission (CCC) executive director Andrew Yeom and IPI from completing their proposed settlement, the Saipan Tribune reported. CCC board chair Edward C. DeLeon Guerrero has been acting on behalf of Yeom in the settlement discussion with IPI throughout last week because Yeom’s temporary contract as executive director expired last April 13.

Mexico’s leading presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum said she expects Petroleos Mexicanos, the world’s most indebted oil producer, to refinance its bonds ahead of upcoming maturities in 2025, Bloomberg News reported. “By necessity it has to be in 2025, because there is a maturity of part of the debt coming up in the next year, and we have to work on that,” she said in an interview on the sidelines of Mexico’s annual banking convention in Acapulco.