Mexico’s economy posted a slight expansion in the first quarter, allowing President Claudia Sheinbaum to avoid recession as she steers the nation through an unpredictable US tariff policy, Bloomberg News reported. Gross domestic product grew 0.2% in the three months through March, above the 0.1% median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg, after a 0.6% decline in the prior quarter. From a year before, GDP expanded 0.8%, higher than the 0.7% median estimate, according to preliminary data published Wednesday by the national statistics institute.
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A 46-year-old Canadian trucking company has been put into receivership at the request of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), which said the carrier owes it $6.7 million, FreightWaves.com reported. Kingsley Trucking ceased operations on Thursday, the same day that the British Columbia Supreme Court placed the carrier into receivership due to the company’s being “unable to secure a transaction, financing, or other arrangement to address the defaults or repay the Indebtedness owing to the Bank,” according to court filings. The Vancouver Island-based trucking company was founded in 1979.
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Ireland’s economy surged in the three months through March as U.S. pharmaceutical giants based in the country boosted production to build stockpiles back home ahead of threatened tariffs, the Wall Street Journal reported. Ireland’s strong start to the year, alongside a pickup in Belgium, supported eurozone growth as 2025 got underway, with figures for the currency area to be released Wednesday. Spain, which also released figures Tuesday, recorded a slight slowdown, while continuing to grow at a robust pace. However, high levels of production to build reserves of drugs in the U.S.
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President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Tuesday to relax some of his 25% tariffs on autos and auto parts, the White House said, a significant reversal as the import taxes threatened to hurt domestic manufacturers, the Associated Press reported. Automakers and independent analyses have indicated that the tariffs could raise prices, reduce sales and make U.S. production less competitive worldwide. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Tuesday briefing that Trump would sign the order later in the day but declined to provide details on the order.
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India's Adani Green on Monday said that its independent review of the U.S. indictment of founder Gautam Adani and top Adani Green executives, who were accused of paying $265 million in bribes for power contracts, did not identify any non-compliance or irregularities, Reuters reported. In November, U.S. authorities indicted Gautam Adani, his nephew and Executive Director Sagar Adani and Managing Director Vneet S. Jaain, alleging that they paid bribes to secure Indian power supply contracts and misled U.S. investors during fund raises.
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Hudson’s Bay Co. ULC, a company that’s so old it once played a central role for goods traders in Britain’s North American colonies, is being stripped for parts, Bloomberg News reported. The retailer, currently under bankruptcy protection in Canada, had devised a plan to rescue six of its 96 stores from liquidation, including its flagship location in one of the biggest shopping hot spots in downtown Toronto. But that plan has run aground and those locations are now being wound up too, and the company’s 17th-century artifacts are being auctioned off.
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The Canadian economy faces short-term turbulence due to the fallout from President Trump’s trade policy, including the risk of tariff-fueled inflation, the country’s finance minister said Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said global policymakers are monitoring economic indicators closely for signs that U.S. trade policy is beginning to throttle growth. He added he would not predict whether Canada can avoid two straight quarters of negative growth, or the technical definition of a recession.
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Japanese and U.S. finance chiefs meet on Thursday for high-stakes talks on exchange rates that have drawn market attention as a venue where Washington could pressure Tokyo to prop up the yen and help it reduce the huge U.S. trade deficit, Reuters reported. As the two countries proceed with separate bilateral talks on tariffs, the thorny currency rate topic has been set aside for Japanese Finance Minister Katsunobu Kato and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to discuss in Washington - the first face-to-face talks between the two. U.S.
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Canadian retail sales fell by 0.4% in February from January at C$69.33 billion ($49.95 billion), on lower sales at motor vehicle and parts dealers, Statistics Canada said on Friday. Sales likely increased 0.7% in March, the agency said in a flash estimate, Reuters reported. In February, sales were down in four of nine subsectors, representing 43.1% of retail trade. In volume terms, retail sales decreased by 0.4%. Read more.
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Mexican lender Banorte will again consider a potential purchase of Banamex, Citi's one-time retail unit in the country which it split off last year, Banorte's CEO told analysts on Wednesday, Reuters reported. "There are a lot of moving pieces," CEO Marcos Ramirez said. "So we will watch closely what's going on and propose." Banorte had previously bowed out of the competition for Banamex in 2022, though Citi was ultimately unable to find a buyer for the unit.
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