Stoil Topalov

The world stock exchanges closed this week with a fall, with the exception of the Athenian one, which closed with 2211.04 points – 2.3% growth since last week. Dow Jones had a bad week, losing nearly 2% and closing with 8309.1 points. In London, the FTSE 100 managed to overcome the losses from the beginning of the week but it still closed with 4233.9 points, which is a fall of 0.45%. The Japanese Nikkei started the week with e gain, which it couldn’t keep and closed the week with a fall of 1.13% or 9816.1 points.

Even though Greece lowered the new car registration tax with 50%, last years’ data shows that sales have fallen with 29.5% for the first half of this year, compared to the same period in 2008. According to the economic newspaper Imersia, this is partially due to the fact that the taxes of the average Greek family have increased with over 50% (30 new taxes since 2004). More increases are expected in October, when the 2010 budget will be formed. Most increases are expected to be of fuel, cigarettes, alcohol, cars and mobile cell phones.

The Greek Customer Protection center announced that the average Greek household consumes more fuel than any other family throughout the EU country members. The average value for the EU is 14.9% from the energy needs of the country to go to fuel. In Greece this value is 50%. Bulgaria is last on the list with 1.2%. Meanwhile Greece is second to last in natural gas consumption – 3.3%.

The other economic news of the week is that fuel prices fell considerably, due to the bad economy events in the US. The price of a barrel was $66.43 last Friday. This is a fall of nearly 6% from last month, when petrol price was $70.63. The news about unemployment in the US contributed to this fall – according to official data, the unemployment level has reached 9.5%. According to brokers, petrol demand is low and prices will probably not increase in the next 3 months.