Word: demands
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...sons and daughters to fake boyfriends and fiancées. Many of the stand-ins are ordinary people who sign up to make a few extra bucks, and while most end up impersonating significant others, Bek Hui Sun, president of the year-old Seoul-based website Helpmon.com, notes that demand for parents-for-hire is growing. "The students really like this," says Bek. His company's site offers the services of nearly 3,000 members, some 40 of whom are willing to help students out of sticky situations. "There's a lot of pressure on students to do well...
...chief executive of Trumpf, a German family-owned machine-tool firm. It has enjoyed a surge in worldwide orders over the past three years, with sales jumping 35% since 2004. Demand from the U.S., the firm's second-largest market after Germany, has accounted for a significant part of this growth. But even though the pace of American orders is now slowing, Trumpf's sales elsewhere-from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, and especially back home in Germany-continue to rack up double-digit growth rates. "We can feel the U.S. slowdown, but it's not unsettling. There's no crash...
...world's economic expansion. There are still relatively few signs that German, Japanese or Chinese consumers are ready to step up to replace them. For example, while China's imports are way up, those gains are due less to a free-spending middle class than to increasing demand for raw materials and components to feed the country's manufacturing sector, which turns the material into a mountain of finished products to ship to the U.S. "If you just look at the numbers, it looks like Asia's exports to China are larger than they are to the U.S.," says...
...regional differences. Jonathan Anderson, chief economist for Asia at Swiss bank UBS, says Singapore, Malaysia and Japan remain more vulnerable if tapped-out Americans start to shop less, given that their own domestic spending is relatively weak; by contrast, China's consumption is rising steadily, propelled partly by housing demand. He points out that China wasn't hit as badly as other Asian countries by the U.S. downturn in 2001, and that it's in a stronger position now to weather a slowdown...
...notching up a $200 billion trade surplus in the first 11 months of last year, the largest since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The good news is that buoyant exports have boosted business confidence in Europe's biggest economy and led to an unexpectedly strong increase in domestic demand. German companies appear to be hiring again: in December, the number of jobless fell by 100,000, the best monthly improvement in years, although the overall unemployment number remains a very high 9.6% of the workforce...