February 06, 2012
February 05, 2012
February 04, 2012
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Britain's weak economic recovery is expected to lead the Bank of England to print £50bn more money in the coming weeks.
The Bank's Monetary Policy Committee is set to announce on Thursday that it is expanding its Quantitative Easing programme from £275bn to £325bn.
Several members of MPC signalled at their January meeting that they would vote for a further round of QE this month.
City economists had thought the committee would approve a further £75bn of asset purchases this month, but services and manufacturing surveys have suggested that the economy performed slightly better than expected in the early weeks of this year. » | Robert Watts, Deputy Political Editor | Saturday, February 04, 2012
February 03, 2012
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Among the more colourful details of Facebook's 150-page S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission is a letter from founder Mark Zuckerberg setting out the social network's "mission".
He also sheds light on an arguably tougher goal – to force a change in the behaviour and expectations of publicly listed companies. Mr Zuckerberg is nothing if not ambitious.
"We've always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we're building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take," he wrote. "We don't wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money."
It sounds like a nice philosophy – and a brave attempt to ward off the short-termism that inevitably comes with a life lived on the public market – but in Facebook's brave new world of quarterly reporting, corporate governance procedures and a real-time trial by share price, Mr Zuckerberg might be forced to rewrite his priorities. » | Katherine Rushton, Media, telecoms and technology editor | Thursday, February 02, 2012
February 02, 2012
THE GUARDIAN: Iran's dependency on oil means an embargo, if fully implemented, has potential to bring the economy to its knees
Iranian officials have in the past been quick to play down the impact of the raft of sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear programme, arguing they have in fact made the regime "self-sufficient" in many areas.
But the latest US and EU embargo on the imports of oil from Iran introduced in the past five weeks has left the leadership little choice but to admit the severity of the problem. In a recent speech at the Iranian parliament, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the embargo "the heaviest economic onslaught on a nation in history".
Iran relies on crude sales for 80% of its exports revenue and also providing most of the foreign currency in the country. The full impact of the embargo is likely to be felt in summer when the new sanctions kick in properly, but evidence of knock-on effects through the Iranian economy are multiplying. The initial impact was felt on the local currency market where a shortage of foreign exchange caused a looming crisis. As a result, the value of Iran's rial against the dollar has fallen to a record low, even experiencing devaluation of more than 50%. » | Saeed Kamali Dehghan | Wednesday, February 01, 2012
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Germany's Bundesbank has entirely exhausted its stock of private assets and run up a quarter of a trillion euros in liabilities propping up the eurozone system, testing the political limits of EMU solidarity in Germany.
The operations are part of the European Central Bank's 'TARGET2' network of automatic payments between the national central banks of the Euroland club. The Bundesbank has already provided €496bn (£413bn) to countries in trouble, chiefly Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain.
"This is reaching the danger point. It is already one and a half times the total budget of the German government," said Professor Frank Westermann of Osnabrück University. "If any of the crisis countries exits the euro or if there is an EMU break-up, the Bundesbank bears extreme risks."
The Bundesbank - the dominant body in the euro system - used to keep a stock of €270bn of private securities (refinance credit) before the start of the financial crisis. This was depleted last year as it sold assets to meet growing demands on the TARGET2 scheme.
Once the debt drama began to engulf the bigger economies, the Bundesbank was forced to borrow money to meet its obligations to offset capital flight, since it refused to sell its stash of gold. It now owes €228bn to German banks. Read on and comment » | Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor | Wednesday, February 01, 2012
February 01, 2012
Facebook, the vast online social network, took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Wednesday as it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service, hatched in a Harvard dormitory room nearly eight years ago, is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumpingGoogle’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that.
In its filing, Facebook, which has more than 845 million users worldwide, said it was seeking to raise $5 billion, according to a figure used to calculate the registration fee. The company will seek to have the ticker “FB” for its shares, but did not list an exchange.
But many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that could value it as high as $75 billion to $100 billion. At that lofty valuation, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Abbott Laboratories, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor. » | Evelyn M. Rusli | Wednesday, February 01, 2012
TrailerMalbouffe by rebusparis
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: French chef takes on country's rise in junk food: A leading French chef has warned that 70 per cent of the country's restaurant food is now 'industrial fodder' as he launched a Jamie Oliver-style crusade against junk food. ¶ Michelin-starred gastronomic restaurants are a fig leaf that hide an army of French eateries, including more and more chains, that sell poor-quality, often factory-produced food more often than not touted as "fait maison" – home-made. ¶ That is according to Xavier Denamur, 48, the self-styled white knight of wholesome, traceable, French food prepared in-house and supposedly the country's trademark. ¶ Mr Denamur is the iconoclastic star of République de [la] Malbouffe (Republic of Crap Food), a documentary released on Wednesday directed by Jacques Goldstein, which claims to investigate the "smokes and mirrors behind … a state with lobbyists but no parliament, with restaurants but no chefs, with farmers but no fresh food. A noxious regime whose motto could be opacity, precarity, obesity." ¶ The film squarely blames falling gastronomic standards in restaurant kitchens on President Nicolas Sarkozy's move to cut restaurant sales tax from 19.6 per cent to 5.5 per cent. ¶ Mr Denamur is filmed berating Christine Lagarde, the former French finance minster and now head of the International Monetary Fund, for playing into the hands of fast food chains and powerful food industry lobbies. » | Henry Samuel. Paris | Wednesday, January 01, 2012
BBC: US home prices dropped more than expected in November, continuing the market's slide in an index of 20 metropolitan areas.
Prices for single-family homes declined 0.7%, instead of the 0.5% forecasted by economists.
Home prices are on average at similar levels to 2003, amid a large supply of houses with weak demand.
Consumer confidence also slipped in January, after two straight months of gains in confidence in the US economy. » | Tuesday, January 31, 2012
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