29/01/2016 World Business Report

Those are the latest headlines from BBC World News.

Now for the latest financial news with

As if China wasn't enough to worry about, could US be

The latest growth numbers may add to fears

Plus, hold onto your hats: Japan's central bank takes emergency action

to stave off the effects of the global turmoil.

It's introduced negative interest rates.

In a moment, who'd be a central banker?

Policy makers around the world are fast running out of ammunition.

We start in the United States amid growing fears

the world's number one economy is stalling badly, and could even be

The latest growth figures are out in a few hours' time.

They're being awaited anxiously by financial markets already badly

I want to show you how things have been going downhill for the US.

In the three months to June last year, the second quarter of 2015,

the US economy was growing at a healthy annual rate of 3.9%.

By the third quarter of 2015, the three months to September,

Economist on average think that in the three months to the end

of December, growth in the US economy slumped to just 0.8%.

Some though think it could be closer to zero,

as the global market turmoil takes its toll on people's confidence.

A few even think the economy actually shrank in the last quarter.

So is there a real risk of the US economy going into reverse, in other

Our New York reporter Nada Tawfik has been been getting the views

This shop has survived in competitive Manhattan for several

years. It is the coldest months, and the Christmas shopping season drives

sales. The co-owner, Adam, says that wasn't the case this year, leaving

him with many unsold parkers. The warmest Christmas in history, it was

70 degrees here and Christmas. That hurts our sales. The weaker pound

means that fewer people come here, and that tends to be part of our

customer base. Shopping districts have been a sea of for sale signs.

The key question many are now asking is if this is a sign of trouble

ahead. Many may think so when GDP figures for the final months of 2015

are released, but not so, says Ellen set nav of Morgan Stanley. Not time

to panic yet, saying that the economy completely fell on its face.

That is what it will look like, but you have to look at the underlying

details. No doubt that will really fan the flames of those recession

fears, which have grown over the last several weeks. Adding to this,

low gas prices means consumers spending more. So, you are not

tempted to spend your money? No. I am in New York, I have to play

smart. The money you save? I will put it in my pocket. America is

still one of the bright spots in an otherwise gloomy global picture, but

if consumers don't carry on spending, all of that could change.

To Asia now where in the last hour or so the Bank of Japan has narrowly

voted to introduce a negative interest rate policy.

Effectively it will cost you 0.1 of a percent to deposit your money

It hopes that will encourage commercial banks to lend more and

Of course it's a response to the global market turmoil

on the slowdown in China - that has rather torpedoed Japan's attempts to

Mariko Oi is following the story for us in Singapore.

This is Japan's central bank telling all the banks in Japan not to give

their money to them, but to put it out and lend it to people and

business. That is right, it is aimed at encouraging people and companies

to start spending money again, because Japan's economy, while it

was recovering gradually because of the economic policies of PM Shinzo

Abe, known as Abenomics, recently it has been slowing down again,

especially with the Chinese slowdown. The market turmoil has

been perfect in the stock market as well. As recently as last week, the

governor of the bank of Japan was believed to have ruled out the

negative rates option, so it caught markets by surprise, within the

Nikkei jumping 3% after the announcement. Japan has been

thinking about this option since early 2000, but it has always

decided against it. The European Central Bank has negative rates as

well. These huge question marks over the

health of the global economy are providing a major dilemma for the

people in charge of the world's monetary policy, the central banks.

Interest rates are already at rock bottom, so what ammunition do they

have left? The Bank of Japan is not The Bank of Japan is not

the only one being forced Earlier this week the

US Federal Reserve said it was It is promising gradual

adjustments to policy. But investors are betting interest

rate rises are on hold for a while at least The Bank of England's Mark

Carney has also been caught on the hop, having signalled that rates

would start to rise this year. He described

the current global economic climate as unforgiving, and ruled out

an immediate rate rise in the UK. The head of the

European Central Bank, Mario Draghi He says the bank will review

and possibly reconsider monetary policy at its next meeting, that's

been taken as a hint there could be To underline the hard time central

bankers are having at the moment, at a speech in Germany this week

Draghi hit out at critics who say The ECB is fulfilling its mandate.

These figures do not stand up to scrutiny. The critics of our

decisions have been proved wrong time and again.

Our guest is from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Thank you for getting up at this terrible power. Is there a point

about the critics to Mario Draghi? If they start turning on the

printing press and pushing cheap money into the system, we have seen

it with the US Federal Reserve, the bank of Japan, it is being suggested

that in the long-term, those policies don't really work.

Obviously, there are lots of actions, including the ECB and Bank

of Japan, but they all face headwinds at the moment. It is a

question of confidence. As much as they try to make money cheaper, with

the economy slowing down there is an issue that people are just not

confident enough to invest, because they see China slowing down and the

global economy. Is it not some of the central banks' fault in the

first place that we are seeing China slowdown? We printed all this free

money, flooding China, which then built a lot, and now a lot of that

money has drained back out and left some emerging economies in a dire

state. It has created an awful lot of trouble, Andy quantitative easing

is coming back, and there are consequences of that. But to deal

with poor global growth prospects, you can't just rely on monetary

policy alone. There is also fiscal policy and structural reforms, some

of which are under way at the moment. They will take time, and

people will say that some economies haven't done the proper reform. Can

I ask you this, as a layman I am a bit alarmed. Either that all the

numbers in the experts on what they are saying about 2016, I'm worried.

If we head towards another sort of global crisis, a big slowdown, there

are no more tools or ammunition left in these central bankers to fight.

They have already used all of that up fighting their 2008 crisis.

Absolutely, and that is why we need to rely on structural reforms and

fiscal policy as well. They are a long time coming, so that doesn't

bode well. Shares in Amazon tumbled

in after-hours trading after results from the online retail

giant disappointed Wall Street. Amazon racked up quarterly sales of

more than $35 billion in the three months to December - up more

than 20 per cent on the previous year - taking annual sales above 100

billion for the first time.