PBOC’s Zhou Urges Cutting China’s $3 Trillion of Foreign-Exchange Reserves
Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
China needs to reduce its foreign- exchange reserves as they exceed the level the nation requires, central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said.
The management and diversification of the holdings, which topped $3 trillion at the end of March, should be improved, Zhou said after a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing late yesterday. The rapid accumulation is putting pressure on the sterilization operations of the People’s Bank of China, he said.
The nation’s foreign-exchange reserves climbed $197 billion in the first quarter, reflecting global imbalances that Group of 20 finance ministers agreed last week to address through deeper scrutiny of their economic policies. China’s surging holdings are fueling inflation that accelerated last month to the highest in 32 months, prompting the government to boost banks’ reserve requirements this week for the fourth time this year.
“Foreign-exchange reserves have exceeded the reasonable levels that we actually need,” Zhou said. “The rapid increase in reserves may have led to excessive liquidity and has exerted significant sterilization pressure. If the government doesn’t strike the right balance with its policies, the build-up could cause big risks,” he said, without elaborating.
The world’s second-biggest economy grew 9.7 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, faster than economists had forecast, and consumer prices climbed Read more…
New record: 26 million Americans now have diabetes
(NaturalNews) More Americans than ever now have type 2 diabetes, according to statistics recently released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Twenty-six million Americans now have the disease, which is ten percent more than in 2008. And a shocking 79 million others have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by higher-than-normal blood sugar levels that indicate pending insulin-production failure.
“These distressing numbers show how important it is to prevent type 2 diabetes and to help those who have diabetes,” said Ann Albright, director of the diabetes translation division at CDC, in a statement. “We know that a structured lifestyle program that includes losing weight and increasing physical activity can prevent or delay type 2 diabetes.”
What is perhaps even more concerning than the sharp rise in diabetes cases is the even larger increase in pre-diabetes cases. According to data, the pre-diabetes rate jumped by nearly 40 percent since 2008. So if the entire pre-diabetic population eventually becomes diabetic, nearly one third of the entire U.S. population will eventually have diabetes.
Currently, 8.3 percent of all Americans, and 11.3 percent of people over the age of 20, now have diabetes. Twenty-seven percent of those that have it, or roughly seven million people, are not even aware of their condition. Based on trends, diabetes rates are only expected to continue to rise in the years to come.
In addition to physical lifestyle changes, there are many medicinal superfoods like almonds, green leafy vegetables, and camu camu, that can help to prevent and treat diabetes when incorporated as part of a healthy diet. Avoiding processed foods like soda that are rich in highly-refined sweeteners will also help to keep blood sugar levels low and prevent the destruction of the pancreas, the organ that produces insulin.
March 9.0 Japanese quake set off tremors around the world
The earthquake that launched a series of disasters in Japan in March triggered micro-quakes and tremors around the world, scientists find.
The catastrophic magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan March 11 set off tremors mostly in places of past seismic activity, including southwest Japan, Taiwan, the Aleutians and mainland Alaska, Vancouver Island in Canada, Washington state, Oregon, central California and the central United States. It was unlikely that any of these events exceeded magnitude 3.
Researchers noted, however, that temblors also were detected in Cuba. “Seismologists had never seen tremor in Cuba, so this is an exciting new observation,” Justin Rubinstein, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at Menlo Park, Calif., told OurAmazingPlanet.
Part of the excitement of the find is the insight it could add into the inner workings of earthquakes.
“Studying long-range triggering may help us to better understand the underlying physics of how earthquakes start,” explained seismologist Zhigang Peng at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Quakes where normally quiet
Most of these micro-earthquakes and tremors occurred in places that already had high background levels of seismic activity, including California’s Geysers Geothermal Field and the San Andreas Fault. Some of the quakes occurred in low-activity areas, such as central Nebraska, central Arkansas and near Beijing.
“Seismologists generally think of the central U.S. as relatively Read more…
Pakistan urges end to US strikes
The row between the US and its Asian ally over the scale of the unauthorized CIA drone operations in Pakistan’s North Waziristan were exposed last week.
Pakistan has repeatedly criticized the attacks which it condemns for violating the country’s sovereignty.
Washington, on the other hand, defends the strikes as necessary to fight the militants it claims to have holed up.
But Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said on Sunday that Washington should share better intelligence so Islamabad can take action against militants itself.
For several months, Pakistani diplomats and military officials have complained that they were being kept in the dark by the US administration’s non-UN-sanctioned military campaigns.
Politicians on both sides are disappointed with the results of investment of billions of dollars in the US military and civilian assistance since 2001 with Washington admitting in a recent report to Congress that the results of the spending fell short of expectations.
More than 1,180 people were killed by over 120 CIA drone strikes in 2010 alone, reports say.
The strikes have further fueled the anti-US sentiment already on the rise in the region.
Stocks Sink on U.S. Credit Outlook as Euro Falls on Debt Crises
U.S. stocks sank the most in a month, oil slid and gold rose to a record after Standard & Poor’s cut the American credit outlook to negative and concern about Europe’s debt crisis worsened. Greek two-year bond yields surged to 20 percent for the first time since at least 1998.
The S&P 500 tumbled 1.6 percent to 1,298.09 at 1:13 p.m. in New York and the Stoxx Europe 600 Index slid 1.7 percent. Ten- year Treasury yields lost three basis points to 3.38 percent as concern about Europe’s finances overshadowed S&P’s move. The euro lost 1.4 percent to $1.4227, while Portuguese debt- insurance costs rose to a record. The S&P GSCI index of 24 commodities slid 1.3 percent as oil and cocoa tumbled.
S&P assigned a one-in-three chance it will lower the U.S. rating in the next two years, saying the credit crisis and recession that began in 2008 worsened a deterioration in public finances. Budget differences among Democrats and Republicans remain wide and it may take until after the 2012 elections to get a proposal that addresses the concern, S&P said.
“This is another indication of the need for the U.S. to better control its fiscal destiny, both for its sake and that of the global economy,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer at Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s biggest manager of bond funds. “Absent credible medium-term fiscal reform, every segment of U.S. society would be faced with higher borrowing costs, a weaker dollar and a less bright outlook for employment, investment and growth.”
Broad Decline
Commodity, industrial and technology companies had the biggest Read more…
Extreme weather is moving tectonic plates, scientists claim
People who are ridiculed for saying that earthquakes are a result of global warming could actually be right, scientists claim.
Long-term climate change has the potential to spin Earth’s tectonic plates, according to a news study from the Australian National University.
Working with researchers in Germany and France, they have established a link between the motion of the Indian plate over the last ten million years and the intensification of Indian monsoons.
Movements of the earth: Tectonic plate movement could be sped up as a result of the weather
Monsoon rain increased by four metres every year, speeding up the motion in the Indian plate by one centimetre a year, said Dr Giampiero Iaffaldano from the ANU research school of earth sciences.
They discovered that enough rocks were worn away from the eastern side of the plate to account for the plate’s anti-clockwise movement.
Dr Iaffaldano said: ‘The significance of this finding lies in recognising for the first time that long-term climate changes have the potential to act as a force and influence the motion of tectonic plates.
‘It is known that certain geologic events caused by plate motions – for example the drift of continents, the closure of ocean basins and the building of large mountain belts – have the ability to influence the Read more…
Gold Price, Silver Price As Well As Silver Dollar Values Will Profit From World Mishaps!
I am sure it will most likely to take really a few weeks or even months to obtain the complete impact from the crisis in Japan. The initial surge in volatility will most likely pave the way for particular possibilities in precious metals and beyond. Any impetus coming from a renewed interest in commodities as the nation rebuilds will bring whatever trading is not boosted by fears from the total score of the disaster. It may not occur right away, but the world’s third biggest economy will restore itself like a phoenix and till then there’s feasible in these markets. Maybe not an improve in jewelry buying or something that may be deemed a frivolity, but investment option demand and provide creating in Read more…Prepare for the Next Conflict: Water Wars
Every minute, 15 children die from drinking dirty water. Every time you eat a hamburger, you consume 2400 liters of the planet’s fresh water resources — that is the amount of water needed to produce one hamburger. Today poor people are dying from lack of water, while rich people are consuming enormous amounts of water. This water paradox illustrates that we are currently looking at a global water conflict in the making.
We are terrifyingly fast consuming one of the most important and perishable resources of the planet — our water. Global water use has tripled over the last 50 years. The World Bank reports that 80 countries now have water shortages with more than 2.8 billion people living in areas of high water stress. This is expected to rise to 3.9 billion — more than half of Read more…
World Bank president: ‘One shock away from crisis’
The president of the World Bank has warned that the world is “one shock away from a full-blown crisis”.
Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk “losing a generation”.
He was speaking in Washington at the end of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Meanwhile, G20 finance chiefs, who also met in Washington, pledged financial support to help new governments in the Middle East and North Read more…
The latest unsmoothed global sea level data from JASON shows a sharp downtick and slight downtrend
One of the great things about WUWT is that it attracts commenters with a wide range of skill sets, who can often contribute far and beyond what we even see from our government sources. I’ve lamented the lack of updates from the University of Colorado sea level website, and when I got no response to emails, I decided to make a rare phone call and ask why. The answer I got from Dr. R. Steven Nerem was:
“This new website design won’t work with our current format, so if you can just be patient and wait a couple of weeks we’ll have it online.”
Not content to wait, and prodded by another commenter in an online tussle, CA and WUWT regular Roman M decided to find out himself. The results speak for themselves, quite a drop in the latest JASON-1 datapoint, with a general slight downturn in the JASON1-2 data since late 2009:
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](https://i0.wp.com/www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](https://i0.wp.com/www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_usoz_2.gif)
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