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Singapore’s key exports growth slows

The Independent Bangladesh: Singapore's key non-oil domestic exports grew 17.5 per cent in January compared with a year earlier, the government said Friday, reporting figures at the top end of analyst forecasts ...

Australian venture proves to have plenty of potential for Blue Chip

Record fourth-quarter trading has pushed the net profit of Blue Chip Financial Solutions for the December year up 18 per cent to $8.4 million. Annual operating revenue rose ...

Increased costs to continue pressure on farm incomes

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Farm incomes will face continued pressure next year as fuel, transport, fertiliser and machinery costs continue to affect the bottom line. Grain farmers are not confident they will have a good year...

Top Stories

Bird flu could kill 142 million, cost $4.4 trillion

News International: SYDNEY: A global bird flu pandemic could kill as many as 142 million people and wipe some 4.4 trillion US dollars from economic output, according to a worst-case scenario published by Australian ac...

Apple farmers can't secure net insurance

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: The Mayor of Stanthorpe in southern Queensland says no insurance companies will insure the netting on local apple farms after severe hailstorms nearly two months ago.

Goodyear takes stronger position in NZ

Scoop: Monday, 19 December 2005, 12:16 pm Press Release: South Pacific Tyres Goodyear takes stronger position in Australia & New Zealand. Melbourne, Australia - 16 December 2...

Wine market still tough for Foster's

Australian Financial Review: Foster's Group has announced a 10.5 per cent rise in underlying first-half profit, underpinned by strong growth in premium beer sales and its $3.7 billion acquisition of winemaker Southcorp, but it was...

Australia cuts inflation forecast, but keeps an eye on wage growth

International Herald Tribune: Australia's central bank on Monday lowered its inflation forecast for 2006, suggesting that interest rates would be kept unchanged as it seeks signs that exports are fueling economic growth. Und...

Not all cheer for beer next year

The Australian: WINE and beer makers still face big challenges in 2006 as they struggle to overcome a continuing oversupply of grapes and a receding thirst for beer among consumers.

Business Headlines ...  

It was Tony Blair's lowest moment since the terrible atrocities of 7 July: when King Fahd of Saudi Arabia died last week, Britain's Prime Minister hailed him as a man of 'great vision and leadership' who 'inspired his countrymen', 'served his country with the utmost dedication and dignity' and 'developed close political, commercial and defence links' with Great Britain. We appreciate you should not speak ill of the dead; but accuracy demands that we point out that only the last bit of Mr. Blair's tribute is true. The British Prime Minister rightly argued in a powerful speech in the aftermath of the London bombings that most of the world has dropped back to sleep after 9/11 and become complacent about the Islamic terrorist threat; yet last week, without batting an eyelid, he praised the legacy of one of the men most closely implicated with the murderous rise of Islamic-fascism. It will not do. During the watch of King Fahd and his half-brother and successor, Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia has become the world's largest promoter and founder of extremist perversions of Islam; the least any self-respecting democracy can do is not to shower them with unearned praise. Read

French bosses break open the bubbly

WHILE the French countryside withers in a prolonged drought and the country's citizens roast on the beaches for their traditional month-long summer holidays, French business is showing signs of a profit-fuelled renaissance. Read

The all-party trahison des clercs

EDUCATION matters more than ever in our new Information Age, which requires more brain workers than ever, and Western workers are facing unprecedented competition from China and India; so the blatant dumping-down of A-levels, once the 'gold standard' of school-leaving exams for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has always had its own exam system) over the past 20 years is a national scandal. Despite the self-serving drivel supplied by a discredited educational establishment, few were fooled by last week's crop of supposedly exemplary results, with their predictable rise in the pass rate (to over 96%, which means A-levels are now almost impossible to fail) and record number of A-grades. Everybody , except those with an interest in denying the truth, knows that the gold-standard of British secondary education has been debased. But this blunt fact is not something that the British Establishment is anxious to face because everybody within it, regardless of political hue, has been complicit. Read

FOR those, such as this newspaper, who advocated a flat tax long before it was fashionable, it is encouraging to witness the explosion of interest in the idea in Great Britain, Germany and elsewhere in recent few weeks. Even George Osborne, shadow chancellor of a British Tory party which has not espoused an original idea for a decade and a half, supports 'flatter taxes', setting up a commission to study the idea. But proof positive that the flat tax is an idea now being taken seriously comes in the shape of various onslaughts against it from numerous liberal-left think-tanks and commentators who, until now, had thought it too radical or loopy to merit even a dismissive comment; and from the forces of Chancellor Gordon Brown, whose troubled tenure at the British Treasury is the very antithesis of flat or simple taxes. Read

WHEN French and Dutch voters gave the proposed European constitution a well-deserved bloody nose last spring, fashionable commentators in Great Britain and elsewhere quickly convinced themselves that this would serve as a wake-up call for overdue reform by shocking Europe's staid and discredited political elite into action. A new political triumvirate would drag Europe kicking and screaming into the 21st century, we were told, downsizing welfare states, cutting taxes and embracing globalisation and the market: Angela Merkel, the German conservative, would replace left-wing Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to become Germany's very own Iron Lady; Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister and supposed Thatcherism reformer, would soon take over from tired old President Jacques Chirac; and, last but not least, a recently re-elected Prime Minister Tony Blair would devote Britain's six-month stint as European Union (EU) president to fight for free-trade and deregulation. Read

Time for action on free trade

MAKING it easier for poor countries to sell their goods and services to rich Westerners would go a long way towards curing global poverty. So it is a cause of great concern that the current "Doha round" of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks is in crisis, with next month's meeting in Hong Kong already expected to end in failure after negotiations in London and Geneva failed to break the deadlock. Free trade is a deeply progressive policy, benefiting the poor the most by increasing their opportunities, as demonstrated by China and India's current growing embrace of globalisation and consequent transformation into economic tigers in under two decades. The world urgently needs freer trade to help create dozens of new Shanghais and Bangalore's across Africa, South Asia and Latin America and the inability of the global political establishment to come to a new trade agreement is unforgivable, suggesting that countries, such as Great Britain and the United States that support free trade, should rethink their strategy. Read

DELL has long been one of America's most innovative companies. Like Southwest Airlines in aviation and Wal-Mart in retailing, it has a business model that gives it a price edge and profit performance others can't match. Rival personal computer makers have reported losses, laid off workers and, in the case of IBM, quit the business. But the Texas firm that Michael Dell founded in his university dorm continues to deliver, exceeding earnings estimates for the past 18 quarters. Read

IF you could build a chief executive officer to spec, how would you do it? You'd engineer someone with machine-like stamina - someone who could work 100 hours a week for 24 years with no apparent ill-effects. You'd add intelligence enough to excel at the nation's best schools, vision enough to peer into the future and recognise the world's most promising business opportunities. You'd make him a discerning judge of talent, and you'd make him tough - able to push aside his own handpicked managers if they didn't deliver. Read

The euro has now become damaged goods

THE news should have sent the US dollar crashing. A massive trade gap of $66bn (£37bn, E55bn), up from $59bn a month ago. So what happened? The dollar rose and the euro fell to a two-year low. Economists describe the euro is a "truly damaged currency". Its latest bout of weakness saw the European single currency lose 2% on the week, taking its fall against the dollar since August to 5% and the plunge from its December 2004 highs to a numbing 14%. Read

FIVE men met in an automobile in a Baghdad park a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein's Baathists regime in April 2003, according to US intelligence sources. One of the five was Saddam. The other four were among his closest advisers. Read