Word: demands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that he feels your pain - to a point. A bedroom community of Perth, Western Australia, Cockburn until recently shared in the buoyant growth rates that turned this part of the southern continent into a giant construction zone. No more. As Australia's great mining boom deflated due to slackening demand from China and the global recession, the region around Cockburn saw unemployment go from 2.1% last October to 7.2% in April. Roughly a year and a half after his victory over longtime conservative Prime Minister John Howard, Rudd dutifully rattles through what his Labor Party will do for this hurting...
...Tensions have also been exacerbated by the economy's increasing dependence on Asian markets. The long economic boom came courtesy of Asian - read Chinese - demand for Australian commodities such as iron ore, coal and bauxite. In large measure, Australians understand the benefit of this regional trade. "The Australian people are enormously practical about the reality of China," says Rudd. "That hundreds of thousands of Australian jobs, directly or indirectly, depend on Chinese trade is something Australians...
...will have to start living within its means - or at least a lot closer to them than it currently does. To keep this new American frugality from battering the global economy even more than it's been battered, somebody has to pick up the resulting slack in demand. Europe and Japan have been hit harder by the downturn than the U.S. has, and they have aging, slow-growing populations unlikely to ignite consumer booms. That leaves the BICs as pretty much the only remaining candidates. These economies are still too small to take up all the slack: together their...
...trading does not need to be regulated so much as monitored. We can assume that corruption exists, but the government does not yet understand the business; officials only recently even admitted that the price does not reflect supply and demand. If we dig deeper, we might find the foreign oil suppliers themselves, posing as speculators, to be the true villains. And deeper still, we will certainly find that the very system is flawed: in a world where hedging against high prices fulfills its own prophecy, we can be sure that prices will never be stable...
...that Chinalco - Beijing's largest state-owned aluminum company - had offered Rio late last year, when prices for the commodities it mines had hit rock bottom as the global recession took hold. Since then, prices for iron ore and other commodities have rebounded, in no small part because of demand from China, which is in the midst of a huge, government-led investment spree to combat the recession. Rio spurned Chinalco, did a joint venture with international competitor BHP Billiton, and announced a rights issue to raise capital. (See pictures of China's infrastructure boom...