The coronavirus crisis may have triggered the long-anticipated tipping point in oil demand and it is focusing minds in OPEC. The pandemic drove down daily crude consumption by as much as a third earlier this year, at a time when the rise of electric vehicles and a shift to renewable energy sources were already prompting downward revisions in forecasts for long-term oil demand. It has prompted some officials in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, oil’s most powerful proponent since it was founded 60 years ago, to ask whether this year’s dramatic demand destruction heralds a permanent shift and…

Unemployment is expected to rise to 33.6% by end of the year Information technology and telecoms among top hiring sectors The number of people looking for employment through Nigeria’s biggest recruiting website has jumped five-fold since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting the struggle faced by many in Africa’s largest economy. “Typically we have about 10,000 active job-seekers a week,” Hilda Kragha, Jobberman’s chief executive officer, said in interview in Lagos, the country’s financial capital. “During this pandemic, we have been having over 55,000, which means more people are looking for jobs.” Like many countries Nigeria has been hit…

Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has been holding on to N900 billion of lenders’ deposits as Cash Reserve Ration (CRR) since January. By CRR policy, banks have a mandate to keep 27.5 per cent of all deposits with CBN. CRR is a portion of bank’s deposit kept with CBN for liquidity control. Fitch Ratings has predicted a 20 per cent hit in Nigerian banks’ revenue this year due to CRR policy and foreign exchange shortage. It said Nigeria’s banks would face rising borrowing costs as CBN’s measures to support naira squeeze lenders, who already hit by Covid-19 pandemic and oil…

Apple's leader shows how a little care can go a long way. Earlier this week, I wrote about a new study from anonymous corporate social network service Blind that found two-thirds of employees believe work from home orders and the broader pandemic were having a negative impact on their mental health. In the study, which included responses from 10,000 office workers around the U.S., Blind found that employees feel alone and it's impacting their professional and personal lives. One Microsoft employee cited in the interview offered a chilling illustration of the pandemic's impact: "the extended working hours and no line…