Asia’s two largest economies, China and Japan, have agreed to coordinate their efforts to support any IMF funding, said Japanese finance minister Jun Azumi on Monday, with ministers from both countries preparing for a G-20 meeting in Washington later this month.
“Rather than make decisions independently, we’ve agreed to consult each other very closely,” said Azumi, after meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xie Xuren over the weekend.
Acting on a ban by the European Commission, the United Kingdom has issued a moratorium against the technique of stripping meat from animal bones, raising concerns over the future of cheap patties and burgers.
The banned process, typically known as the ‘Desinewed Meat’ removal technique, involves stripping scraps of cow and sheep meat from bones under low pressure, with the reconstituted product closely resembling minced meat.
The BRICS nations must be united in backing a single nominee as the next World Bank president, said Brazil’s finance minister Guido Mantega on Thursday.
Though Mantega was speaking after a meeting with the US nominee Jim Yong Kim, he insisted that his government had not made up its mind on whom it would back; and he would try to seek a consensus among all the BRICS as to whom the best candidate for the post should be.
The eurozone has announced it will keep the benchmark lending rate at the current 1 percent, with the ECB chief Mario Draghi saying it is still premature for the Bank to even consider an exit from its monetary easing policies.
For the last few weeks, analysts and policymakers have been discussing steps for a backup plan should the ECB decide to exit the money market after nearly three years, and 1 trillion euros of cheap bailout loans.
Human trafficking is an industry worth $32 billion, and at any one time 2.4 million people suffer the misery of this humiliating and degrading crime, with 80 percent of them exploited as sexual slaves, says the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
At a special UN General Assembly meeting on trafficking, the Drugs and Crime office based in Vienna said only one out of every 100 victims is ever rescued, and two out of three victims are women.
Germany’s competition watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), is set to launch an inquiry against five major petrol companies for allegedly trying to drive independent petrol stations out of business through illegitimate pricing practices, said AFP on Wednesday.
Greece will accelerate the development of a 20 billion euro ($27 billion) solar-energy project named “Project Helios”, after the ancient sun god, said prime minister Lucas Papademos on Tuesday, after the government made investments in renewable energy a “national priority” in order to aid the nation’s economic recovery.
“In the last few years, talk has centred on Greece’s fiscal discipline,” said Papademos, while at a renewable energy and infrastructure development summit in Athens.
China may be the world’s second largest economy behind the United States, but a recent industry report shows that the East Asian giant is already the world’s largest market when it comes to grocery spending. According to researchers IGD, China collectively spent $970 billion at the supermarket last year, $60 billion more than the US.
In a sign of how quickly China’s middle class as grown, the Chinese grocery sector is now worth $970 billion dollars, tripling in value between 2006 and 2011.
China has said it will more than triple the total amount of foreign investment in Chinese securities, as the existing programme nears its limit. At the same time, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has called for bolder financial reforms, calling for the ‘Big Four’ banking monopoly to be ‘smashed’.
Earlier this year, the Chinese state media reported that authorities were considering expanding the capacity of the qualified foreign institutional investor scheme (QFII), a key channel for foreign investment in Chinese capital markets that was first launched in 2003.
The Brazilian government rolled out more tax cuts and other relief packages for ailing industries on Tuesday, after President Dilma Rousseff claimed that “predatory competition” from big exporters like China and the U.S. were harming the nation’s economy.
Speaking to business leaders in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, Rousseff said that the new measures were necessary in order to revive the nation’s economic growth, after it slowed to just 2.7 percent growth last year compared to 7.5 percent growth in 2010.
