IB Economists

Facebook invested $5.7 Billion for a 9.9% stake in Reliance subsidiary Jio, this will help Jio Mart users to make payments through Whatsapp, which is the most widely used messaging app in India. Jio Mart helps local grocery stores to connect with consumers nearby with the help of e-commerce. Jio Mart is seen as a competition to ‘Local Stores by Amazon’ which also allows local grocery stores to connect with consumers in their locality. The service was launched six months ago on a trial basis. However, Local Stores, the stores themselves are responsible for delivering the goods, while in Jio Mart goods use its own delivery system to deliver the goods, this includes employees of Jio Mart to pick up goods from the store and deliver it to the consumer. During the coronavirus pandemic the need to deliver essential goods such as groceries at the doorstep is paramount and consumers may also be willing to pay extra for this service. Facebook and Amazon are among the largest corpora...

On 8th March 2020 there was a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, which consequently caused 31% price drop (From $31.02 to $20 per barrel). The factor which led to the price war between the two countries is the drop in quantity demand for oil barrels due to the widespread of Coronavirus, subsequently Russia refused to agree with  OPEC to stabilise/fix a price, clearly indicating a non-collusive oligopoly. The price war has caused the oil prices to drastically fall, and has also led to reduction in the world oil supply, which can have drastic effects on the economy because oil is an essential resource for the world, as oil is used for transportation, energy production, cooking and more, without these activities an economy will have major problems in functioning, for instance visualise an economy sustaining without electricity; communicating with other without electricity would become impossible, which can result in an economy down turn. Nonetheless, the reduct...