Those who manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate could and should face criminal prosecution, said the Financial Services Authority today. The ‘broken’ Libor system will also get a ‘complete overhaul’ through tougher regulation.
Martin Wheatley, managing director of the FSA told the BBC’s Today programme on Friday morning that bankers guilty of fixing Libor could be imprisoned in the future.
Forty years after China and Japan first commenced normalized diplomatic relations, a group of islands – known as Diaoyu and Senkaku respectively – is now threatening to reignite past rivalries, including both nations’ claims to geopolitical power in the region. Behind the dispute lies several considerations, including handling internal and international political relationships, which both countries must now resolve in order to avoid a military conflict.
The European Union will ask the World Trade Organisation for authorisation to impose up to $12 billion in annual trade sanctions on the U.S. for illegal subsidies made by the U.S. government to the Boeing Company, said a report by the Associated Press on Thursday, in the latest twist of a long-running EU-U.S. row over their respective aviation companies.
What if you could create an ‘ideal’ or ‘model’ economy simply by copying and adapting the best economic policies from around the world? Although no country in the world is likely to ever come close to achieving this (in the near future at least), emulating policies that have worked elsewhere and then reconfiguring them for local conditions can see greater sustainable growth – and speed the path to national improvement at home.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has hit out against his successor Mario Monti, criticising Monti of caving in to German pressure when he imposed austerity reforms.
Berlusconi, who turns 76 on Saturday, said in an interview with L’Huffington Post that Monti’s policies were “exclusively recessionary” and added that Germany should drop its austerity drive or leave the euro altogether.
The ties between energy consumption, economic growth and the labour market are now closer than ever before. But as countries begin to hit their peak in any one of these categories, can this relationship be changed in order to ensure a more sustainable economy?
The number of jobs available to job-seekers has been a problem for quite a long time now – since 2000 in the United States, and longer than that in Europe. If we look at the percentage of the US population who are employed, it is now back to 1984 or 1985 levels.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, added a record 290 billion yuan ($45.96 billion) into its financial system on Tuesday, reported Reuters, through a series of reverse bond repurchase agreements aimed at easing a potential cash crunch coming from an upcoming week-long holiday.
The number of billionaires in China has fallen for the first time in seven years amid the country’s worsening property and stock market slump, according to the Hurun Research Institute.
The number of billionaires in China fell to 251 this year, down 20 from last year, but still significantly higher than six years ago when there were only 15 billionaires.
At the same time, the average wealth of the Hurun Top 1,000 has fallen 9 percent to US$860 million, though that amount still almost doubles that of 2008 when it was US$439 million.
Despite possessing massive potential in natural resources, individual states within East Africa remain too small, and too fragmented, to fully utilise these resources in the global arena, without being exploited by larger and more developed economies. The hope of citizens as such lies in an East African Federation and, further down the line, a fully-integrated African state.
International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde has called for strong and decisive growth plans from policymakers in Europe and the United States, warning that global economic recovery is slower and weaker than anticipated.
