DAILY GLOBAL BUSINESS POINT » Economy

Kyrgyzstan Turmoil

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:33:30 +0000

International donors have pledged $1.1bn (£643m) in aid to Kyrgyzstan at a conference in Bishkek.

The money will be used to fund reconstruction in the Central Asian state following deadly ethnic violence in the south last month.

Hundreds of people were killed in the unrest and thousands of homes, mostly belonging to ethnic Uzbeks, destroyed.

Many Uzbeks who fled their homes are still staying with relatives or living in tents in their ruined courtyards.

Officials at the conference in Bishkek said the money would be given over the next 30 months, with $600m to be given this year.

The Kyrgyz government had appealed for the slightly higher amount of $1.2bn.

Crime in UK at all time low

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:21:54 +0000

The number of crimes committed in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1981, official figures have shown.

In 2009-10, crimes committed fell to 9.6 million - 9% below the previous year, indicating that the recession has not caused an increase in offences.

The latest British Crime Survey (BCS) said there was a "notable" drop in theft, burglary and fraud.

Yet violent crimes fell only 1%, which it said was not a significant change.
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Sexual offences recorded by the police in 2009-10 totalled 54,509, a 6% increase on the previous year.

Portugal downgraded again by Moodys

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:16:07 +0000

The global rating agency, Moody's does not want to once again be labeled as a poor predictor / rating agency. So it has swung into action in the recent past to downgrade the weaker European countries like Spain and Greece.
Today it was the turn of Portugal to get the whacking from Moody's, as the rating was downed two notches to A1.

The downgrade was on expected lines though, and hence the stock markets continued to ignore the negative news, and rather kept moving up over 1.5% today across key European markets. Expect major downgrades in the coming days, warn experts , citing the major spending cuts planning by most of the European countries.

Spain gets into austerity mode

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:07:45 +0000

The Spain currency has been downgraded by Fitch also few weeks back and that has made borrowing almost impossible for the country. So the country has embarked on a major spending cut exercise which is expected to cut down the pension payments and also medical benefits for the government sector employees.
Also the government is expecting to cut down spending on social sector in the coming months as it does not have the money required to carry them out at current pace.
Over the medium term these measures can create more unemployment and also labor unrest. Let us see how the government handles these problems in the coming months.

Schemes from Government

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:07:48 +0000

When the economy went down and the corporations and the citizens were facing financial crisis, the US government had introduced various scheme to help people withstand the difficult times. The most crucial crisis came when banks allotted home loans liberally prior to recession and at the time of recession, so many people lost their jobs, and the borrowers of home loans could not repay their loans. There were quite many defaults of the repayments and the banks ordered foreclosures of the loans and seized the homes of the defaulters. Real estate tumbled down badly. There were cyclic reactions with many industrial giants facing bankruptcy. People who were left without jobs also feared loss of their home but could not do anything, as sustaining themselves became a question.

The government introduced Home Loan Modification program which gave incentives to the banks and lending institutions when they modified the repayment amount of the defaulters and thus enabled them to pay the repayments. The American Residential Law Group gives complete details of all the beneficial scheme introduced by the US government and the body ensures that the people are aware of such schemes and program by promoting the programs and make the people benefit out of them.

US has found a treasure of minerals in Afghanistan

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:30:43 +0000

US have unearthed some untapped mineral deposits very recently in the grounds of Afghanistan. The mineral deposit discovered by US in Afghanistan is worth some $1 trillion. The mineral deposits are more than the previously found reserves that are found in Afghanistan. The mineral deposits are so worth that they can change the economy of Afghanistan itself.US senior government officials said that the mineral deposits can alter the Afghan war itself.

Previous reservoirs of Afghanistan include huge deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, industrial metals and lithium. The deposits which are present in Afghanistan have a range of metals which benefit today modern industries. The metals of Afghanistan seem to be very essential for new machineries of today’s world. One day Afghanistan can become the worlds mining centre as it has many minerals in it. The huge mineral deposits can make Afghanistan to become one of the main centre for mining officials reported.

The Pentagon memo which was out recently described the way the mineral treasure can change the economy of Afghanistan. Pentagon memo described Afghanistan as the “Saudi of lithium” due to the mineral deposits of Afghanistan. The laptops and blackberries which we use have the key raw material lithium and the mineral available in Afghanistan. The big deposit of mineral treasure was discovered by the American geologists and a team of pentagon officials.

The oil spill can drown democrats

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:50:30 +0000

The US Gulf of Mexico oil spill is now indicated to be the worst disaster in the American history, and the British Petroleum company , itself is admitting that the spill is over 15000 barrels a day. And Lousiana coast and Florida coast are already flooded with crude oil spill and it would take months to clear the mess.
The Obama administration has already seen the high unemployment take out the popularity rating to an all time low in March 2010. And latest reading , post the crude oil spill, would be definitely indicating further steep deterioration in the democrats' popularity.
There are hundreds and thousands of people who are out of their livelihood in the Gulf of Mexico region due to the oil spill, and quite a few of them have already filed court cases against the oil giant. As per latest reports, the oil spill is likely to be contained totally only after the second week of August, which is a neat eight to nine weeks away.
So expect further deterioration in the Gulf of Mexico environment and that is certainly expected to pull down the Democrats out of government in the next general elections, saye xperts.
Obama has to really work hard, and the global environment has to be supportive for him to recover the lost ground.
The further compounding of European crisis could only make things worse for Democrats in US.

US private job growth stagnates

admin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 07:08:57 +0000

Everybody was expecting the private job growth for May 2010 to be very robust, but the data that was presented on Friday afternoon, was absolutely pathetic. But for the temporary Census job additions in the month of May 2010, there was hardly any addition in the entire private sector.
The ongoing Europe crisis is said to be forcing the private sector employers to delay their permanent employee additions as they fear another recessionary dip in the near future. The negative data was good enough to pull down the US stock market indexes by 3% to 4% in a single day.
And that drop was good enough to take the indexes below their 2010 beginning position which takes them to below the 200 days moving average.
The coming weeks could prove to be volatile as there is more ambiguity on the Europe scenario, with a negative bias.

US markets set to surge in June

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:54:01 +0000

The month of May has been very bad for the US markets with both Dow Jones and Nasdaq losing out all their 2010 games in a matter of days. In fact the US markets lost over 10% in a single trading session in May 2010, in a matter of just 20 minutes, which was later on confirmed by the authorities as a technical flaw.
But since then there has been many positive data flow from the US in terms of unemployment and also home sales. Even the consumer spending data has been above expectations while the durable goods order position has also been able to register a positive growth.
And the month of June 2010 could also be good for Europe due to the expected short covering that is overdue. So expect a short term surge in US markets this month, say experts.

Spain downgraded by Fitch also

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 08:12:44 +0000

Fitch has now downgraded Spain sovereign rating by a notch to AA+, as it feels that the 24 billion dollars austerity measures could pull down the economic recovery further. The rating agency is doing the downgrade after the downgrade by Standard and Poors nearly a month back.
The public anger against the austerity measure is set to grow over the coming weeks and months once the measures start pinching the public. There could be further downgrades of other weak countries like Portugal and Greece and Ireland in the coming weeks by the global rating agencies.
This time these agencies do not want to take chances and are acting well in advance in terms of downgrade.