For the third day in Kazakhstan, there are protests against the increase in gas prices from 60 to 120 tenge per liter. On Monday, January 3, spontaneous rallies escalated into clashes with the police, and have not subsided to this day. What's happened Protests in Kazakhstan began on January 2 in the west of the country, in the oil-producing Mangistau region. The reason for the start of the protests was a sharp rise in prices for liquefied gas, a popular automobile fuel in Kazakhstan.

For the first time since 2015, BMW has surpassed Mercedes in terms of the number of premium cars sold in a year, Bloomberg writes , citing the post of head of BMW sales Peter Noth on LinkedIn. Sales figures will be released on January 12th. In the first nine months of 2021, BMW sold 1.7 million vehicles under the brand of the same name, 112,000 vehicles more than Mercedes. In 2021, automakers are facing a global semiconductor shortage.

Representatives of 23 countries at the OPEC + ministerial meeting did not change their strategy and maintained the same rate of oil production recovery for February - by 400,000 barrels per day, according to a report following the talks. Production has been ramping up gradually since OPEC+ countries agreed in May 2020 to cut it by a record 9.7 million barrels per day due to falling oil demand amid pandemic restrictions.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has scheduled alliance talks with Russia for January 12, Reuters writes , citing a NATO official. Earlier, at the end of December, Stoltenberg announced plans to hold the first meeting of the Russia-NATO Council in Brussels in two and a half years and called January 12 the tentative date.

Due to the spread of the omicron strain of COVID-19 in the United States, the number of cases of infection almost doubled in four days of the new year, writes Bloomberg. The country set a world record for the total number of cases - more than 1 million people on January 3 alone. Diseases in the USA The previous record for the number of infected in the United States was set in late December at 590,000, and this figure was already twice as high as a week earlier, Bloomberg notes.

Banks are going to adjust their approaches to borrowers after the Central Bank begins to limit the issuance of consumer loans. This was reported to RBC in VTB, Promsvyazbank and MTS Bank. Sovcombank and Raiffeisenbank predicted a decrease in the availability of loans for certain categories of borrowers. What's happened In December, Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing the Central Bank to impose bans on issuing unsecured loans from 2022.