‘Turning point’

The International Monetary Fund raised its growth outlook for the first time in a year, saying it sees a “turning point” for the global economy. The risk of a global recession remains, as well as one in the US, but it’s diminishing, the IMF said, thanks in part to resilient American spending and China’s reopening. “The outlook is not worsened this time around, which in itself is good news,” chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said (the IMF cut its 2023 outlook three times last year). Nevertheless, he cautioned that the light at the end of the economic tunnel is still a ways away. The fight against inflation is not yet won, monetary policy will need to remain contractionary and some countries will need to tighten further. “There are still some challenges to get on our way to a sustainable recovery that is broad and long-lasting,” he said. —David E. Rovella

Investors who took a hit last week when a New York Stock Exchange malfunction sent everything sideways, sparking wild price swings, are trying to recoup their losses. They might come up short. But for everyone else, January ended on a pleasant note as Wall Street awaits tomorrow’s expected Fed rate hike. Here’s your markets wrap.

Despite frenzied firings by tech and finance giants that have left tens of thousands unemployed, US manufacturers aren’t similarly frightened of a downturn. Brooke Sutherland writes in Bloomberg Opinion that, rather than slash spending on factory expansions and new equipment, they’re preparing for a pretty good year.

In the US, wage growth was easing in most cities by the end of last year, according to new government data. Los Angeles was one exception among major metro areas, posting an increase in wages and salaries for 2022 that was faster than the rise in local consumer prices.

The US is planning on backing away from its emergency Covid-19 footing, while in China local authorities are turning former quarantine facilities into housing. Beijing has claimed the death toll from its current infection wave, triggered by an abrupt end of restrictions, is falling. But reported fatalities have been far below those predicted by independent experts, some of whom said deaths could surpass one million. According to the World Health Organization, Covid fatalities reached almost 6,000 a day in early January, but the lack of transparency from China has made global figures problematic. And in Japan, a new infection wave has been quietly rising. Meanwhile, as the world strains to put the pandemic behind it, the waning of the emergency has proven to be bad news for this company.

Vladimir Putin has long sought to re-establish Russian hegemony over much of the former Soviet Union, most recently by waging war on Ukraine. By invading, the Kremlin leader called NATO’s bluff. After almost a year of war, he has his answer. Rather than cow the alliance, he has solidified it while triggering its potential expansion. His plan has also gone awry in another fashion: The war is pushing away those former Soviet states he hoped to dominate.

Microsoft contends it’s going to keep making new games in the popular Halo franchise at its prized 343 Industries studio—despite rumors to the contrary. But after a leadership overhaul, mass terminations of its employees and a host of additional big changes, the outfit is all but starting from scratch.

A biotechnology startup that promises to resurrect woolly mammoths is now the first “de-extinction unicorn,” with a valuation said to be over a $1 billion. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based startup, is making public a new round of investment this week that will help fund its effort to bring back perhaps the most famously extinct animal of them all: the dodo.

Bloomberg continues to track the global coronavirus pandemic. Click here for daily updates.

The 747 jumbo jet started with a handshake deal. In the mid 1960s, the leaders of Boeing and PanAm agreed that if the US planemaker pushed ahead with its audacious new design, the airline would buy it. That agreement would kick-start one of the most successful programs in civil aviation, singlehandedly transforming the way the world flies and making the 747 the Queen of the Skies for decades to come. Now, its reign has come to an end, as the final 747 made flies off.

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