FINANCE
Poland ready with liquidity
Poland’s central bank is ready to supply the country’s banking system with liquidity if a need arises and its intervention in the foreign exchange market will be random, Governor Marek Belka said late on Saturday. The current storms in the European economy carry a risk of shortages of available cash, Belka said at the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank fall meeting in Washington. “The central bank is ready to, if it becomes necessary, to supply liquidity to Polish banks,” he said. “They should feel secure. Even if the international banking system dries up they can count on us.” Belka also said that should the current destabilization in the country’s forex market continue, the central bank will carry out intermittent intervention aimed at keeping the rouble from sliding and spooking speculative investors.
ECONOMY
Australia not crisis-immune
Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan sounded caution yesterday over Canberra’s plans to return to surplus next year, warning that Europe’s debt fears had delivered a “huge hit” to global confidence. Swan told ABC television from Washington there was a mood of “sober realism” among finance ministers at this weekend’s meetings of the G20 and IMF, with a “fair degree of concern” about the state of the global economy. Swan said Australia was not immune from Europe’s problems, tempering his previously strident promises of returning the budget to surplus by next year to 2013. “We’re determined to come back to surplus, but I just make the observation that these events globally have an impact upon global growth,” he said. “That has an impact upon domestic growth. That has an impact on revenue collections. And of course it makes it tougher to come back to surplus.”
PORTUGAL
Forecast both good and bad
Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho said on Saturday he anticipated a better-than-expected economic performance this year, but that the outlook for next year was gloomier than previously forecast, Dow Jones Newswires reported. He said in an interview that the economy would contract by 1.8 percent this year, better than the previously estimated -2.2 percent growth, but that he expected -2.3 percent growth next year, a downgrade on the -1.8 percent that had been predicted. He credited better domestic performance for this year’s upgraded forecast, but explained that the new figures for next year were brought on by a worsening global economic outlook. He said he expected a return to positive growth in 2013, at 1.2 percent.
INTERNET
Google feature tag launched
Google News has announced a twist in the automated news-feed algorithm: “featured” content selected from the stories it delivers every day. Google announced on Saturday that news organizations can add “standout” metadata tags to their best stories and the US edition of Google News may include a “featured” label when it displays a link to the story. There is no guarantee “standout” stories will be featured, the company said. If a news provider puts the standout tag on more than seven stories in a week, Google’s algorithm won’t factor in the tag from that company as much, or may ignore it, Google said. News organizations can also use a standout tag to highlight strong work by other providers. The plan was announced at the Online News Association conference in Boston.
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],”
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
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