Other Business

Saturday, 04 February 2012 00:00

Author / Source : AFP

NEW DELHI, Feb 3: When Norwegian telecom giant Telenor entered India’s overcrowded and fiercely competitive mobile market in 2009, the Scandinavian firm insisted it would be one of the survivors.

Other Business

Saturday, 04 February 2012 00:00

Author / Source : Agencies

US jobless rate falls to 8.3pc as jobs surge
WASHINGTON, Feb 3: The US unemployment rate fell to 8.3 per cent in January, its lowest level in more than two years, thanks to an unexpected surge in hiring, government data showed Friday.
The economy added 243,00 net jobs last month, the Labor Department reported, much better than the average analyst forecast of 155,000.
Businesses stepped up hiring, adding 257,000 jobs.
“Job growth was widespread in the private sector, with large employment gains in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing,” the department said. Employment by governments, which had been shedding jobs under tight budgets, changed little over the
month, it said.
The jobs growth brought down the jobless rate from 8.5 per cent in December. Most analysts expected it would hold steady in January.     

Saudi king, IMF chief discuss ‘world economy’
RIYADH, Feb 3: King Abdullah and visiting International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde met on Friday in the Saudi capital and discussed the “world economy,” the official SPA news agency reported.
The two reviewd “IMF action and developments in the world economy” in the presence of the Saudi finance minister and central bank governor, it said, without elaborating on what was discussed.
Oil giant Saudi Arabia is a member of the G-20 group of leading economies under pressure to boost their contributions to the IMF’s resources for crisis intervention.
The Fund says it wants to raise another $500 billion (380 billion euros), on top of the nearly $390 billion it has available now, to help countries in financial straits.
“The IMF will count on its main member states” to provide funding, Lagarde was quoted as saying in an interview published on Friday by Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, without naming Saudi Arabia.
“The financial crisis is a global problem, considering its effects on all nations,” Lagarde said, according to an Arabic translation of her comments.
“It is therefore in the interests of everyone to commit to a track that will ensure an exit to this crisis.” Lagarde arrived in Riyadh from Tunisia, where she assured authorities of the IMF’s support. She is on a two-day visit to the kingdom, her first since being appointed last year to head the world body.

Sri Lanka raise rates, slows lending
COLOMBO, Feb 3: Sri Lanka’s central bank on Friday raised its key interest rate for the first time in five years and asked commercial banks to reduce lending in the face of a trade deficit. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka hiked its benchmark lending rate by 50 basis points to 9.0 per cent, the first rise since February 2007 when the rate was upped to 12.0 per cent from 11.50 per cent.
The bank also asked commercial banks to rein in lending, arguing that much of it financed the country’s surging import bill, owing to higher oil costs and cheap credit that drew a flood of foreign-made vehicles into the country.
The IMF, which extended a $2.6 billion bailout to Sri Lanka following a balance of payments crisis in 2009, said it welcomed Friday’s policy moves, but said the island needed to do more to “balance the economy.”
International Monetary Fund’s Brian Aitken, who led a team to assess the island’s economy, said Sri Lanka could not allow the huge trade deficit that was seen in 2011 to continue along with dwindling foreign reserves.
However, he said the problems faced by Sri Lanka which is emerging from nearly four decades of ethnic war, was not as “acute” as it was in 2009 when foreign reserves dipped below $1 billion. Government forces crushed Tamil separatists in May 2009 and the regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa thereafter sought the IMF bailout. “We don’t see the situation as that acute,” Aitken told reporters in Colombo at the end of their latest review of the island’s economy.     Agencies