Iran’s central bank has agreed to open won accounts at two South Korean state-owned banks to avert disruption in bilateral trade despite international sanctions, Seoul’s finance ministry has announced. The Iranian central bank plans to open the accounts with the Industrial Bank of Korea and Woori Bank by the end of this month so that exporters and importers from both countries can settle their transactions in won, it said in a statement. Trade with Iran accounts for less than 1.5 percent of South Korea’s trade but Iran is an important supplier of crude oil to South Korea, which imports all of its crude needs. The two countries have sett...
Potash Corp is trying to stitch together a consortium led by China to back a management buyout to trump BHP Billiton’s $38.6bn hostile offer, according to the Globe and Mail. Potash Corp has said ever since BHP launched its bid nearly a month ago that it was working to find a white knight, and worries in China about BHP getting control over the market for a key crop nutrient have spawned talk that China would try to block BHP. Citing unnamed sources, Canada’s Globe and Mail reported on its website the bid being considered would include a big element of capital from a Chinese resource company or investment fund, with smaller contributions ...
At times like this, both can claim to have right on their side. The yuan’s rise against the dollar on September 14 to the highest level since it was revalued in July 2005 comes on the heels of another bumper trade surplus, which central bank deputy governor Hu Xiaolian recently identified as a major determinant of the exchange rate. But the People’s Bank of China is, tellingly, allowing the yuan’s appreciation to gather pace in the very week when US lawmakers are scheduled to grill Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over what many of them see as a substantial undervaluation of the exchange rate. IMF economists recently estimated the yu...
A German central bank board member who caused outrage with remarks about Muslim immigrants and Jews has resigned after coming under pressure from political leaders including Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Bundesbank said Thilo Sarrazin, 65, who accused Turks and Arabs of exploiting the welfare state, refusing to integrate and lowering the average intelligence, would leave his post at the end of the month. “Dr Sarrazin has asked the president to relieve him of his duties,” the bank said in a brief statement and Sarrazin himself confirmed he had stepped down during a book reading in Potsdam near Berlin. He had already been relieved of some o...
The US trade deficit narrowed more than expected in July, as imports retreated and exports shot to their highest since August 2008, according to a government report that could lift hopes for third-quarter economic growth. The monthly trade deficit shrank 14 percent to $42.8bn, which was smaller than the mid-point forecast of $47.3bn from economists surveyed before the Commerce Department report. Exports rose to 1.8 percent to $153.3bn, led by strong overseas demand for US civilian aircraft, machinery, computers and other capital goods. Imports fell 2.1 percent to $196.1bn, after a three percent rise in June that had caught many analysts by su...
Afghan security forces used batons on unruly customers scrambling to withdraw their savings from a branch of the graft-hit Kabulbank, the country’s biggest private financial institution. Officers from the National Security Directorate struggled to maintain control of up to 200 people outside one branch in the capital as desperate customers tried to take out money ahead of a three-day Muslim holiday. The crisis in Afghanistan’s top private bank developed after the company’s top two directors quit amid unproven media allegations of corruption. The central bank ordered the assets of Kabulbank’s former chairman Sher Khan Farnood and chief...
Economic recovery is gathering pace in the European Union and growth this year will be higher than initially forecast, according to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. In a policy speech to the European Parliament in the French city of Strasbourg, the head of the EU executive said structural reforms must be accelerated in the next 12 months and the 27 countries in the bloc must show solidarity. “Europe must show it is more than 27 different national solutions. We either swim together, or sink separately,” he said. The latest official forecasts put growth in the EU at one percent in 2010 and estimated growth in the 16 countr...
South Africa’s biggest union federation COSATU, a partner of the ruling ANC party, has called for a reversal of measures taken to relax foreign exchange controls and taxing short-term capital flows. The positions laid out in an economic policy paper put pressure on the ruling African National Congress to reconsider its foreign exchange and economic policies. COSATU said the ANC’s policies in the past ten years had failed to create employment. It called for job creation to be the primary mandate of the South African Reserve Bank....
Zambia has raised its 2010 economic growth forecast to 6.6 percent from a June forecast of 5.8 percent after a higher than expected performance in the first half of the year, Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane has announced. “We adjusted the growth forecast to 6.6 percent from 5.8 percent because we now know that mining, agriculture and tourism all performed better than we had expected,” Musokotwane said at a media briefing. Musokotwane said Zambia’s economic growth between 2011 and 2013 should average 6.5 percent per annum partly due to a global recovery over the period. Zambia in June cut its growth forecast for 2010 to 5.8 percen...
The Bank of Japan is not doing enough to fight deflation and one possibility is for the central bank to buy more government bonds, a campaign aide to a ruling party powerbroker challenging Prime Minister Naoto Kan said. But lower house lawmaker Banri Kaieda, an aide to Ichiro Ozawa, also said that the BOJ alone could not rescue Japan from deflation and that the central bank’s remaining policy options were limited. Ozawa is challenging Kan in a Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) leadership election on September 14 but the outcome is too close to call. The winner will likely be prime minister by virtue of the party’s majority in the powerful l...