FRANKFURT – Euro area central bankers are widely expected to leave key interest rates unchanged Thursday amid mounting evidence that the Iran war is driving consumer costs higher as it undercuts economic growth.

Traders and economists agreed that any policy action from the public lender will come at the next decision-making meeting of the European Central Bank in six weeks, with both calling for a 25 basis-point hike at that juncture.

Preliminary data for April Eurozone annual inflation and Q1 GDP are due just hours before the ECB is set to announce its decision, and neither data point is likely to garner applause at the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt. An economists’ poll said headline annual price growth this month is expected to rise three-tenths to 2.9%, which would be the highest mark since the end of 2023 and nearly a point more than the central bank’s target of 2% over the medium term. Euro area economic growth is forecast at 0.2% q/q, with the first month of the war – March – part of the mix.

(Continue Reading – LS)

TORONTO, April 28 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Quantum computing is inching closer to its ChatGPT moment. IBM and Alphabet-owned Google are racing to exploit exotic physics to crunch problems that normal chips can’t. They’re not alone: upstarts like Rigetti Computing and IonQ have raised $7.2 billion via mergers with blank-check vehicles and subsequent deals in the last five years, according to investment bank Cohen & Company Capital Markets. Even more would-be quantum questers are following suit. The hardware is nearing real‑world usefulness, but turning lab breakthroughs into a viable business model faces key challenges.

Above all else is the question of what quantum computing can do. Regular chips’ manipulation of bits – simple ones and zeroes – underpins the modern economy. The novelty of devices developed by IBM or Rigetti is that they use qubits, which can be zero and one simultaneously. That lets them explore many computational possibilities at once.

(Continue Reading – RTRS)