Japan will use 2.3 billion yen ($29 million) from its supplementary tsunami relief budget to fund the country’s controversial annual whaling hunt in the Antarctic Ocean, confirmed an official from the Japanese Fisheries Agency on Wednesday.
As the indebted eurozone countries scramble to find ways to raise liquidity or risk default, contagion threatens to spread across the continent and the globe – an unfortunate reality of globalization and the interdependency of economic and financial markets. However, the pain is for citizens across Europe to bear, for they will inherit a national debt.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have submitted a joint letter to European Union President Herman Van Rompuy, in which the pair called for changes to be made to EU treaties so as to allow for tighter rules on deficit spending as well as for centralised governance of national budgets.
The decision to amend the treaties must be made by the end of the upcoming EU summit, said the letter, adding that the new measures must be ready for implementation by March 2012.
The pro-business line “Corporations are people” rings in many ears. If this is so true, what type of person would they be? This infographic highlights the angle and tendencies of which may make them sociopaths or psychopaths.
Many are familiar with the “Corporations are people” rhetoric used to support the case for business-friendly policies. By attributing human life-like qualities to corporations and other big institutions, corporate personhood allows corporations to have the rights and responsibilities similar to legal persons.
Ireland’s finance minister Michael Noonan has unveiled the country’s 2012 austerity budget. In order to qualify for continuing IMF-EU loans, the painful budget saw taxes increase by a further 2 percent and included a deep spending cut.
The Irish government on Monday announced a total of €3.5 billion in budget savings. In his address to parliament, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin said the budget was necessary to protect the “long-term and strategic interests of the state and its citizens.”
Australia, like all modern economies, needs an assured supply of energy to function effectively. Presently, coal generates about 80 percent of Australia’s electrical energy output; but as external sources of fossil fuels continue to decline, a shift to renewable energy sources is needed. But the costs for such a move, particularly to solar power, are high. What are Australia’s alternatives?
Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, has been slapped with a record £10.5 ($16.4) million fine, and ordered to repay £29.3 million to elderly investors after authorities found it guilty of mis-selling scandal involving almost 3,000 vulnerable elderly customers living in care.
According to media reports, HSBC was found guilty of selling investment products to elderly customers that were not suitable for them.
It is increasingly evident that Europe’s political leaders, for all their commitment to the euro’s survival, do not have a good grasp of what is required to make the single currency work. Public-sector cutbacks today do not solve the problem of yesterday’s profligacy; they simply push economies into deeper recessions.
The fears of a major economic crisis are exaggerated, according to “rogue economist” and author of the bestselling books Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics.
Despite fears and extensive media coverage of the widening financial crisis, there is no doomsday in the horizon, said Steven Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago and 2003 John Bates Clark medallist.
International credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s have placed 15 out of the 17-member eurozone on its negative credit watch list, as growing “systemic stresses” in the region continue to “put downward pressure on the credit standing of the eurozone as a whole.”
Of the 17 countries forming the euro zone, only two countries were not included in S&P’s latest move: Cyprus, whose rating was already on the negative credit watch list, and Greece, which had a junk CC-rating.
