thursday, August 2, 2012
11
Current as of: 08/01/2012
Currency Code
Buying rate banknotes
Buying Cheques
Selling Rate
U.S.A. Dutch Antilles Canada Britiain Switzerland Netherlands Sweden Denmark Norway Japan (per 10,000)
USD ANG CAD GBP CHF EUR SEK DKK NOK JPY
1.77 98.00 1.76 2.72 182.13 217.05 25.34 28.46 28.69 225.63
1.78 100.00 1.78 2.77 182.85 219.03 26.06 29.18 29.41 227.69
1.80 100.20 1.80 2.83 183.65 221.23 26.86 29.98 30.21 229.97
All rates for amounts up to AWG 100,00 per item.
IMF chief warns on decline in confidence
Finance Fed holds fire on new stimulus despite weak growth WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Federal Reserve downgraded its assessment of the US economy yesterday saying growth had slowed, but shied away from launching a fresh round of economic stimulus. "Economic activity decelerated somewhat over the first half of this year," the Fed said at the conclusion of a two-day top-level meeting as it left current monetary policies in place. The interest rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee said it expected "economic growth to remain moderate over coming quarters and then to pick up very gradually." "The unemployment rate
YEStERDAY’S Crossword Answer
will decline only slowly." But there was no new action to juice the economy. Instead bank policymakers reiterated their pledge to leave interest rates close to zero until the end of 2014 and said they stood ready to act. The Fed has kept interest rates at historic lows, between zero and 0.25 percent, since December 2008 in a bid to spur recovery from the Great Recession. The committee vowed to "provide additional accommodation as needed to promote a
stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions in a context of price stability." With few tools left in the box and the outlook murky, the Fed has been reluctant to embark on a third round of asset purchases, or quantitative easing, dubbed QE3. Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues have preferred to wait and see whether a recent slowdown has been a blip, or a harbinger of worse times ahead.
IMF: Japan must do more to shrink public debt TOKYO (AFP) - Japan must do more to shrink its massive public debt, the International Monetary Fund said yesterday, but added that the nation's disaster-hit economy was recovering well despite turmoil overseas. The Washington-based IMF "welcomed" Tokyo's plan to double the country's sales tax to 10 percent by 2015, a deeply unpopular move that the government said was crucial to put Japan's fiscal house in
order. The legislation has passed the lower house of parliament but it remained unclear whether it would get a stamp of approval in the upper house before becoming law. Japan is grappling with a debt that stands at more than double gross domestic product, the highest ratio in the industrialised world, and it is poised to grow as a rapidly ageing population turns to public pensions.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde yesterday warned that the world was suffering a crisis of confidence amid tumult in Europe and looming problems in the United States. Citing a litany of problems, from Greece's sovereign debt crisis to poor economic data, Lagarde told reporters "what we're seeing at the moment is clearly a decline of confidence." And for good reason given the "relatively bleak picture" on the global economic scene. "We don't see a major
uptick either in advanced economies or in emerging markets," she said. Lagarde also warned that the eurozone's long-running public debt crisis is not the only problem confronting world leaders. She stressed the need for the United States to avoid year-end mandated drastic spending cuts and tax increases. Congress has the power to avert the so-called "fiscal cliff. There are serious questions concerning the US economic future, particularly as a result of the possible fiscal cliff."
Spanish regions rebel against debt limits MADRID (AFP) - Several Spanish regions are rebelling against the central government's decision to cap their debt, raising fresh doubts yesterday over its ability to meet deficit targets agreed with Brussels. Regional finance chiefs at a meeting with the national treasury agreed late Tuesday to an overall debt ceiling for the 17 regions of 15.1 percent of output in 2012 and 16 percent in 2013. But four regions, including two of the largest, Catalonia and Andalucia, refused to accept the central government's clampdown on their finances. Catalonia, Spain's richest region with an economy equal in size to Portugal's, boycotted the meeting altogether while the finance chief of Andalucia, the country's most populous, walked out of the gathering. Two smaller regions, Asturias and the Canary Islands, voted against the targets at the meeting.
"The lack of internal cohesion is highly damaging to the international credibility of Spain at a key moment for its economy and that of the eurozone," Barcelona-based daily La Vanguardia wrote in an editorial yesterday. Spain has slashed spending and raised taxes as it seeks to convince markets that it will not need a full bailout, on top of a 100 billion euro ($123 billion) credit line from the EU agreed in June for its stricken banks. The regional governments, which fund education and healthcare, are crucial to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's effort to bring the country's overall public deficit down to just below a EU limit of 3.0 percent of output by 2014. They accounted for twothirds of Spain's deficit slippage last year, when the country missed its target of keeping the deficit to 6.0 percent of economic output and instead let it slide to 8.9 percent.