Rising commodity prices have further to go February 6, 2011 FOR two weeks our headlines and television sets have been dominated by Egypt. Prior to the scenes in Tahrir Square, all eyes were on Tunisia; contagion is spreading across the Middle East. So what role did rising food costs play in pushing the region to the brink? And how can citizens be expected to understand [...]
Forget gold, here’s the copper rush February 6, 2011 CRACK open your piggy bank and empty your penny jar. Do it now and do it fast. Forget about the gold rush; it is all about the copper rush now. The price of the metal is going through the roof, hitting $10,000 a tonne. This sort of price action means the two pence piece in [...]
Mubarak claims he can’t leave as protesters rage February 3, 2011 EGYPTIAN President Hosni Mubarak declared yesterday that he was “fed-up” with public service but couldn’t leave his post immediately for fear of sparking further violence, as the official death toll on the nation’s streets rose into double figures. Mubarak told ABC News in an interview that “after 62 years in public service, I have had [...]
US PUBLIC DEBT CONCERNS FED’S BERNANKE February 3, 2011 AMERICA’S “extraordinarily wide” government deficit must be tackled, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke warned last night. Referring to “the daunting fiscal challenges” the US faces, Bernanke said the public finances were “unsustainable” and would remain so unless “Congress enacts significant changes in fiscal programmes.” The government’s annual deficit has risen to more than nine per [...]
FREW STEPS UP FOR THE 30 PER CENT CLUB CAUSE February 3, 2011 GOOD news – of a kind. The 30% Club has finally found a female chairman to join its ranks. For those not au fait with the club’s goings-on, it was founded to pursue the “aspiration” of getting boards at the UK’s top companies to be at least 30 per cent female by 2015. While the [...]
Beware: the Japanese could intervene again February 1, 2011 THE famous samurai and military strategist Miyamoto Musashi once said: “If the enemy thinks of the mountains, attack like the sea; and if he thinks of the sea, attack like the mountains.” The Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) strategy to keep the yen weak against the dollar, however, is probably not that sophisticated. It intervened by [...]
FED EASING SET TO CONTINUE: LOCKHART January 31, 2011 UNEMPLOYMENT in the US is “nowhere near acceptable levels,” a senior Federal Reserve policy-maker said last night. “Accommodative Fed policy is still required,” said Dennis Lockhart CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, suggesting that the Fed’s $600bn (£375bn) asset-purchasing scheme (QE2) will continue, along with historically low interest rates. Joblessness in the US [...]
FED HAS DONE A GOOD JOB ON US EQUITIES January 31, 2011 THE Federal Reserve has so far done an excellent job of goosing US equities through its ongoing asset purchase programme. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has intimated, boosting stock prices is now one of the Reserve’s aims, on top of its officially mandated dual role of ensuring price stability and full employment. So investors were [...]
THE WEEK AHEAD January 30, 2011 COMPANY NEWS ● Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will launch the first iPad only newspaper on Wednesday, The Daily. ● The oil giant Exxon Mobil reports earnings today. ● As does budget airline RyanAir, which releases its third quarter earnings results today. ● Tomorrow the iPhone chip manufacturer ARM Holdings releases its fourth quarter results, which [...]
A waste of talent January 27, 2011 FILM REVIEW HOW DO YOU KNOW Cert: 12A I WANTED to like this film, I really did. It’s the work of James L Brooks, the Simpsons’ producer. It’s got talented stars in Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd, and it’s been praised for being an intelligent romcom. Well, it may be intelligent and it has the [...]