Israel Active

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for November fell 0.1%. This was a major surprise with analysts predicting that the index would rise by 0.2%. This is the third consecutive month that the index has been below analysts' expectations.

Israel’s Composite State of the Economy index increased by 0.2% in November. There was growth in manufacturing and in the exports of goods and services. Imports declined slightly.

The fund aims to help small and mid-sized Israeli enterprises alleviate the credit crunch caused by the debt crisis in Europe and global economic slowdown

Israel's 88 year-young President Shimon Peres has recently become the publisher of an online daily named Shimon Post. The daily edition has a pretty wide distribution and includes articles published on the world's leading media outlets on economics, politics and policy.

UK mobile phone giant Vodafone’s venture capital arm has made its first ever investment in Israel and first ever investment in a clean-tech company. CellEra Inc develops platinum free fuel cell technology for storing and converting energy at a significantly lower cost than technologies available on the market.

The chairman of Britain’s Virgin group attended the Bezeq Expo Communications conference. He was marketing his sub-orbital space trips, due to start next year.

There was a welcome 0.3% fall in Israel’s Consumer Price Index to an annual 3.4%.

The reason I didn’t publicise last month’s announcement that Israel’s 2nd quarter GDP growth was a healthy 3.2% was because I didn’t trust the early figures. That will teach me – the Central Bureau of Statistics has more up-to-date information and revised up growth for the quarter to 3.4%.

Estimates are that the new gas strata discovered in Tamar's deep sands contains 0.5-1.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The discovery also implies that there is more gas in the larger Leviathan field.

An important milestone was reached in Israel’s economic plans when Nobel Energy informed its partners that exploratory drilling of the well had been completed and natural gas had been discovered. The expectations are for reserves of 19-20 TCF, compared with a current estimate of 16 TCF.