British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is recruiting international support for his unyielding stance on deficit cutting, the Financial Times said yesterday.
In an editorial article published in the Financial Times, Osborne and several co-authors called for “hard decisions on spending, entitlements and taxation in countries with large budget deficits.”
The article was co-authored with the finance ministers of Australia, Canada, Singapore and South Africa.
It was written on the initiative of Osborne and Singaporean Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is also the chair of the International Monetary and Finance Committee of the IMF, following a conversation between the two men earlier this year.
The article coincides with two gloomy reports on the British labor market, being released yesterday, which suggest that economic growth is slowing.
Osborne believes there is a growing international -consensus that Britain has got its fiscal strategy broadly right, according to the Financial Times.
“Getting public finances back on to a sustainable trajectory is central. Nobody should underestimate the political difficulties inherent in the task, but it first requires a collective sense of reality,” the article said.
“Hard decisions on spending, entitlements and taxes in countries with large budget deficits are unavoidable,” it said.
“Consolidation must be accompanied by targeted and fiscally sustainable policies to spur job creation, plus training and private investments to lift each economy’s potential to grow and meet its people’s aspirations,” the ministers wrote.
Commenting on the problems of further contagion in the eurozone, the finance ministers said the European Central Bank must take decisive steps to reassure markets.
“The eurozone needs to demonstrate commitment to greater fiscal integration and governance arrangements that avoid moral hazard and entrench fiscal responsibility,” the ministers said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day