Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said most of his G20 counterparts see the global recovery as “fragile” and urged Europe to press on with closer financial integration and the US to cut its budget deficit.
“It’s critical that leaders of many major economies now get on with the necessary structural reforms needed to underpin growth,” Swan said in his weekly economic statement released yesterday.
“From my initial meetings, it’s clear most of my G20 colleagues view the global recovery as fragile,” he said.
The world economy will grow 3.3 percent this year, the slowest since the 2009 recession, and 3.6 percent next year, the IMF said on Oct. 9. That compares with July predictions of 3.5 percent for this year and 3.9 percent for next year.
Even as the US has recorded more positive data in recent weeks, the nation’s recovery remains “shaky,” Swan said.
“The most pressing issue for whoever wins this week’s presidential election will be working with Congress to avert the fiscal cliff,” Swan said, referring to US$607 billion in federal spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to take effect in January unless the US Congress acts.
US President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney crisscrossed the US on the final weekend of the campaign before tomorrow’s election as a closely watched poll in the swing state of Iowa showed the incumbent ahead there.
Obama is leading the Republican challenger 47 percent to 42 percent among likely Iowa voters, the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll shows.
“While avoiding the fiscal cliff is critical to supporting activity in the months ahead, the US will also need to outline a strategy to get its budget back on a sustainable footing to support economic growth over the longer term,” Swan said.
Swan said he will travel to Washington from the G20 summit in Mexico for meetings with US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, US Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.
In Europe, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s bid to please lenders from the EU and IMF with a 13.5 billion euro (US$17.3 billion) austerity package and unlock funds ran into renewed obstacles last week. A law on state asset sales scraped through parliament, raising questions whether the government will be able to muster enough support to pass the measures.
Swan said that about 18.5 million people in Europe are looking for work, more than Australia’s entire adult population.
“Perhaps most troubling is the fact that youth unemployment is around 50 percent in countries like Greece and Spain,” he said.
Europe’s unemployment rate is 11.6 percent, compared with 5.4 percent in Australia.
Back in Australia, Swan is bidding for a A$44 billion (US$45 billion) swing to bring the nation’s budget back to a surplus in time for an election due by late next year.
“We have an enviable combination of solid growth, low unemployment, contained inflation and low debt, with the budget returning to surplus ahead of every major advanced economy,” he said. “The problems we see in so many parts of the developed world only highlight the need for Australia to continue our nation’s long record of reform.”
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