Japan’s government has discussed the possibility of building an underwater gas pipeline from Russia, said former Japanese foreign minister Seiji Maehara, with the country preparing for a nuclear-free future following the shutdown of its last working nuclear power plant late Saturday.
The Basel Accords were introduced to protect consumers from bad banking practices; yet somehow they managed to exacerbate the 2008 financial crisis even further – causing a sharp drop in drop in GDP and employment, while the sharp sell-off in assets ensured further declines. Why did the Basel accords fail so miserably and what can be done to ensure better regulation of the banking industry?
More than 2,000 senior public officials in the United Kingdom may have benefitted from a controversial pay deal scheme, which allowed them to lower their personal tax bills, said a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
Tokyo’s city government has raised nearly $1 million from its citizens in order to buy a small chain of islands in the East China Sea, which have been at the centre of a territorial dispute between the Japanese and Chinese government.
The Senkaku Islands – also known as Diaoyutai in China – is a group of uninhabited islands located about 140km away from the east of Pengjia Islet in China, and about 170km north of Ishigaki Island, Japan. Since 1971, ownership of the islands have been a hotly contested dispute between Japan, China and Taiwan.
Pig faeces could be China’s next big energy source, claimed a report by Reuters on Wednesday, following the invention of a bioreactor called “PooCareTM”, which is able to convert solid waste into biofuel.
Bank of England Governor Sir Mervyn King has conceded for the first time that U.K.’s central bank should have properly identified and warned about the risks facing banks in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, and has vowed to take unpopular measures in the future to prevent banking excesses.
“We did preach sermons about the risks. But we didn’t imagine the scale of the disaster that would occur when the risks crystallised,” King said.
The Italian government will cut 4.2 billion euros ($5.6 billion) from the budgets of numerous ministries and public services over the next six months, said Prime Minister Mario Monti, in the hopes of avoiding a sales tax hike that would have harmed consumer confidence even further.
Monti was speaking to journalists after a five-hour-long Cabinet meeting late on Monday, where the government sought to discuss ways on how to eliminate wasteful spending, implement better purchasing policies, and sell unused government properties.
The United States fixation with the Renminbi has distracted the government from far more important economic issues in its relationship with China. Rather than vilifying China as the principal economic threat to America, this relationship should be recast as an opportunity – especially when the opportunities of market access far outweigh the currency threat.
The Indian government has decided to lift its restrictions on fresh cotton exports, after unexpectedly announcing a ban on March 5th this year following concerns over the domestic supply.
According to a report by Reuters, 1.5-2 million bales of cotton will be allowed for export for the current year ending September 30, which before the ban had already seen a record 11.5 million bales sold overseas.
Local communities in the U.K. may still be against hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, but the government has once again proven that its interests are more closely aligned with investment bankers in the City of London than those forced to live with the consequences.
