Brazil has powered past Britain to become the world’s sixth largest economy, according to the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research. Britain, in turn, drops slightly to seventh place.
Major Brazilian newspapers on Monday celebrated CEBR’s report that Brazil has overtaken Britain in sixth place, behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and France.
The world has turned upside down. All of a sudden, “rich” countries were the ones running large deficits, while “poor” countries ran surpluses – accumulating large stocks of external assets, including financial claims on Western economies. At first glance, this could seem to reflect what advocates of a new international economic order had in mind. But appearances can be misleading, and, in this case, they are misleading in a significant way.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, has requested for an additional 689.4 billion yen ($8.8 billion) in aid from the Japanese government to help the utility cover compensation payments to those affected by the twin Fukushima nuclear disasters.
The Nikkei news daily reported today that Japanese trade and industry minister Yukio Edano will urge the troubled company to accept a public fund injection and a de-facto nationalisation.
U.S. firms are taking advantage of the European debt crisis to make loans and pick up assets owned by cash-strapped regional banks, according to a New York Times report on Monday. An estimate from Morgan Stanley expects European financial institutions, largely under pressure from regulators, to shed up to $3 trillion in assets over the next 18 months.
As Europe battles its financial crisis, U.S. businesses and financial firms are snapping up assets owned by European banks, as European regulators demand them to raise capital and shrink their balance sheets.
Shanghai has become the latest major Chinese city to enforce real-name registration laws for users of social media websites, following the example of the capital Beijing set earlier this month.
The new rules are “in line with Chinese laws and regulations to foster a healthy internet culture so as to better manage social networking websites and instant-messaging tools,” said a statement by Shanghai’s municipal authorities, as quoted by Xinhua, on Sunday.
The cost of living in China is rising, with inflation climbing every single month. In order to attract workers, the southwest Chinese province, Sichuan, has raised the minimum wage by a sharp 23 percent amid the rising cost of living.
China’s state media agency, Xinhua, reported yesterday that the province of Sichuan was raising the minimum monthly wage by 23.4 percent starting on the 1st of January.
The European Central Bank yesterday pumped in €489 billion ($640 bn) into the Continent’s banking system, in hope the much-needed liquidity could alleviate the region’s credit squeeze.
The loans which were given to 523 banks revealed the difficulty of borrowing from other banks and money markets in the coming year, and will be lent at the average of its benchmark interest rate which currently stands at 1 percent.
The Bank of America has reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department to pay $335 million over allegations that it engaged in minority lending discrimination against qualified African-Americans and Hispanic mortgage-borrowers.
According to Attorney General Eric Holder, the record settlement was “the largest fair-lending settlement in the history of our nation.”
[quote] These institutions should make judgements based on applicants’ creditworthiness, not on the colour of their skin, Holder added[/quote]
The decade for emerging markets has come. It is not an understatement that there has been a major shift in global powers following the financial storm that started almost 5 years ago. Despite the storm, emerging markets have already captured 40 percent of world GDP. Looking ahead, a lesser-known revolution – theorised: disruptive innovation – will see to the exponential growth of emerging markets in the next decade.
California’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against the largest US mortgagers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a bid to get the companies to reveal answers over their lending and foreclosure practices.
AG Kamala Harris is suing the two mortgage giants in essentially identical lawsuits over 12,000 foreclosed properties in California where they served as landlords, using the legal approach to insist that the firms respond to 51 investigative subpoenas.
