SPAIN
Catalonia wants bailout
The debt-struck Catalonia region reached out Tuesday for a 5 billion euro (US$6.28 billion) central government rescue as the entire nation lurched closer to a sovereign bailout. The northeastern region’s government, facing huge repayments on its 40 billion euro debt, said it would tap an 18 billion euro liquidity fund set up by Madrid to finance troubled regions. “The government has decided to request participation in the liquidity fund,” Catalan government spokesman Francesc Homs said. However, the region would do so “without accepting political conditions.”
FRANCE
Business sentiment still low
Business sentiment edged higher this month, but remained at its lowest level since early 2010, data released yesterday by the national statistics institute showed. The official business climate indicator compiled by the INSEE institute for the eurozone’s second-biggest economy gained one point to 90 points, after the group revised the figure for July lower. However, the index remained below its long-term average. Businesses in the manufacturing sector reported that activity was weak and that their order books have deteriorated further. Foreign orders rose slightly.
SOUTH KOREA
New current account record
The current account surplus rose to a new record last month as falling world oil prices pushed down the value of imports, the central bank said yesterday. The surplus in the account, the broadest measure of trade, was US$6.10 billion last month. The previous monthly record, a revised US$5.88 billion, was set in June this year. The goods account showed a surplus of US$5.32 billion last month, up from June’s revised US$5.05 billion, after exports fell 4.1 percent year-on-year to US$46.58 billion last month and imports dropped 5.8 percent to US$41.27 billion. The service account saw a surplus of US$579.2 million last month, while the primary income account had a surplus of US$401.9 million last month.
CHINA
House-prize controls ‘work’
A Cabinet official says economic growth is “stabilizing at a slow pace” and controls imposed to cool surging housing costs are working. The government’s Xinhua news agency cited the minister in charge of the country’s planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, as saying yesterday that the response to China’s economic slowdown has been effective. Economic growth fell to a three-year low of 7.6 percent in the second quarter. “The country’s economic growth is stabilizing at a slow pace,” Xinhua paraphrased the official, Zhang Ping (張平), as saying at a meeting with legislators. He said speculative activity blamed for pushing up housing costs has been “effectively suppressed.”
BRAZIL
Floating oil terminal touted
The state-owned energy giant Petrobras said on Tuesday it would deploy the world’s first floating oil terminal capable of refueling tankers on the high seas. “The new technology will ensure lower costs, by reducing the distance covered by oil transport vessels,” the company said in a statement. Currently, crude oil must be ferried from offshore rigs to the coast where tankers come to fill up. However, the new “Transfer and Storage Offshore Unit will make it possible to store oil on the high seas and to transfer it to export vessels,” the statement said, adding that the first terminal will be operational in June 2014, 90km off Rio de Janeiro.
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