Singapore’s March manufacturing output is up 43% on year, faster than expected, on robust growth in electronics, pharmaceuticals sectors.
Result beats +30.3% forecast in Dow Jones poll of seven economists.
Economic Development Board revises February growth downward to +17.9% on year vs +19.1 reported last month. Seasonally adjusted output down 1.5% on month, compared with down 7.9% predicted by poll.
Data unlikely to prompt fresh MAS tightening as numbers already factored in 1Q GDP estimates.
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Singapore’s manufacturing output expanded at a faster-than-expected pace in February, albeit at a slowed pace than January’s record increase, suggesting the rate of growth may moderate in coming months.
Output rose 19.1% from a year earlier, boosted by electronics and pharmaceuticals, the Economic Development Board said Friday, beating the median forecast of a 14.6% increase, according to a Dow Jones Newswires poll. The expansion in January was 39.4%.
Toyota Motor Corp shares lagged a strong rise in other Japanese auto stocks on Wednesday after the world’s biggest automaker said it would shut down production at two of its US factories to match slowing sales. The planned shutdown at its Kentucky and Texas plants for a total of at
Singapore’s aerospace industry had output worth $7 billion last year, on par with the performance in 2008, according to Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean. Teo was speaking at the opening ceremony today for a local airshow.
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In the first half of 2009, Chinese electricity output was 1.6442 trillion Kw/h, dropping by 1.7% over the same period. In 2008, it increased by 12.9% over the same period. In June of 2009, Chinese electricity output was increased by 5.2% over the same period, changing the situation of continuous decline for 8 months. In [...]
In endorsing the bill to audit the Fed, PhD economist Dean Baker wrote last week:The country now has almost 25 million people who are unemployed or underemployed as a result of the Fed’s disastrous policies. Millions of people are losing their homes an…
Japan’s factory output rose for the fourth straight month in June, up 2.4% from May, as the manufacturing sector continued to recover.
For the April to June period, output rose 8.3% compared with January to March, which was the biggest quarter-on-quarter rise since 1953.
However, factory output last quarter was still substantially lower than the same time a year earlier.
And separate figures showed consumer spending was down again last month.
Retail sales were 3% lower in June than a year earlier, the 10th monthly fall in a row, as consumers continued to cut spending because of job market fears.
Analysts said the two sets of official figures showed that Japan’s slow recovery from recession was being led by exports, but that domestic consumption remained weak.
The Japanese central bank said early this month that the country’s economic conditions had "stopped worsening", but downgraded its economic forecast for the current financial year.
The Bank of Japan now expects the economy to shrink 3.4% in the 12 months to 31 March 2010, a deeper contraction than its previous forecast of -3.1%.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Nigeria, the world’s eighth largest oil producer, does not know exactly how much of the black gold it churns but one thing is certain – three years of militant attacks have led to a sharp decline. The country of 140 million people has vast oil and gas reserves but violent unrest since 2006 in
By: Ron Hart
Before making their own names as the cream of the crop amongst forward-thinking musical acts of the 00′s, Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden and Adem Ilhan, along with bandmate Sam Jeffers, were an instrumental British outfit known as Fridge. Together, they forged a bold fusion of the sounds emanating from Chicago’s post-rock movement through innovative groups like Tortoise and Gastr del Sol with the skittering electronic rhythms of Aphex Twin and Autechre that remains one of the hidden treasures of the experimental ’90s.
However, while you may swear these guys were perpetually connected to some kind of a laptop or drum machine to capture the wholly alien sonic palpitations they created together, many of their compositions were crafted utilizing nothing more than your standard guitar-bass-drums arrangements. And even when they did employ the use of samplers, they did so by such organic means that you couldn’t tell what was filched from source material and what was created by their own hands.
Following the trio’s surprise reunion album in 2007, The Sun (JamBase review), Fridge look back on their salad days with Early Output 1996-1998 (Temporary Residence), a 21-track collection anthologizing the group’s genesis on Output Recordings, a revolutionary electronic-based record label run by Trevor Jackson of the UK dance unit Playgroup. Curated by Hebden, Ilhan and Jeffers themselves, these tracks showcase the band’s post-rock leanings more so than their later EPs and LPs, particularly on tracks like the 15-minute “Angelpoised,” which sounds like Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock crunked out with an 808, or “Orko,” a vibe-heavy near-nine-minute jam that comes off like it should owe studio points to John McEntire. It’s hard to think this stuff was recorded on cassettes in a crude home studio; it all sounds so great.
Elsewhere, shades of Hebden’s evolution as Four Tet can be traced back to tracks like
“Zedex Ay Ti Wan” and “Concert in Your House,” while “Helicopter” and “A Swerve and a Spin” offer up a heavy, Slint-like guitar dirge that foreshadows the chaotic freeform of Hebden’s recent collaborative work with jazz drummer Steve Reid.
Though most of the material here is from Fridge’s first few EPs and their two Output full-lengths, 1997′s Ceefax and 1998′s Semaphore, Early Output features six previously unreleased tracks: the fuzzy, flowing, ten-minute space jam “Distance” followed by five lo-fi fragments of compositional sketches that barely clock in at three-minutes total.
Longtime fans of Fridge might find this collection a little superfluous if you already own most of what they released on Output. However, for those who got turned onto the genius of Fridge through either Four Tet or Adem, this makes for a great beginner’s guide.
JamBase | In The Crisper
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The BBC’s output treats the findings of thousands of scientists on climate change as no more than ‘views’ or ‘opinion’
Years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I worked for the BBC’s natural history unit as a radio producer. It was a great job, and my colleagues were stimulating and fun. I was allowed to make investigative environmental programmes, and we exposed some shocking scandals. We recorded the head of customs in Abidjan offering to sell us smuggled chimpanzees, for example, and we found that a bulk carrier which crashed off the coast of Cork, polluting rare habitats, appeared to have been deliberately scuppered.
After Mrs Thatcher launched her coup against the BBC, its executives quickly lost their appetite for investigative programmes, and my boss explained that we no longer had the support we needed to continue. Since then the natural history unit has continued to broadcast beautiful, thrilling programmes about the world’s wildlife. Occasionally it makes an environmental programme. But by and large it presents the biosphere as if it inhabits a planet yet to be discovered by human beings (except of course the cameramen you see struggling with the elements in the “how we made it” segments).
The most extreme example was the three-part series on the Congo made for the BBC by Scorer Associates. At the height of a devastating civil war which had caused the deaths of some 4 million people, the series reported that “the Congo may once have been known as the ‘heart of darkness’ – today it seems more like a bright, beautiful wilderness.” In two and a half hours of programmes the killings were not mentioned.
Lovely as the unit’s output remains, I believe that it creates a misleading impression of the world, which can have grave political consequences. It encourages people to believe that all is well with the world’s ecosystems; often it produces the only footage viewers see from far-flung parts of the world. I am not arguing that the political or environmental context should dominate the unit’s output, only that it should be acknowledged and explained, however briefly. Is this too much to ask?
Yes, apparently. For the past few years an environmental campaigner called Peter Hack has been writing to the BBC asking about one of these gaps. As far as he can discover, over the past 17 years (since the 1992 Rio earth summit in other words) of BBC films about the ecosystems of east Africa, there has not been a single mention of climate change. Yet these places have been hit harder than almost anywhere else by changes in weather patterns. Kenya, for example, has suffered a series of extreme droughts, whose frequency appears to be unprecedented. These have direct and immediate impacts on the region’s wildlife. But watching Big Cat Diary or any of the other films the unit has made in the Serengeti, Maasai Mara and other great parks and reserves, you wouldn’t have the faintest idea that anything had changed.
Peter Hack has just shown me the latest letter he’s received from Gerald McCusker at BBC Information. McCusker explains the gap thus:
“It’s not always possible or practical to reflect all the different opinions on a subject within individual programmes and we feel that over a reasonable period our coverage will reflect a diverse range of views and opinions with regard to this issue.”
So it turns out that the entire science of climate change, the work of thousands of researchers, the tens of thousands of papers published in scientific journals, the indisputable facts about changes in temperature, precipitation and wildlife populations in east Africa is no more than a “view” or “opinion”. Nice to know where you stand, isn’t it?
