Business and Finance news

Lawmakers at the Democratic Party of Japan said they would support the central bank’s independence should they win next month’s general election and govern for the first time.
“We should respect the central bank’s independence on monetary policy,” Tsutomu Okubo, who is a director of the upper house’s financial committee, said in an interview […]

New Zealand’s economy is likely to start recovering earlier than many of its trading partners, Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard said.
“Early signs of a global recovery have now emerged,” Bollard said in notes for a speech delivered today to a business audience in Napier. “New Zealand looks likely to start recovering ahead of […]

Sri Lanka kept its benchmark interest rates unchanged, waiting to see if three reductions in borrowing costs this year are enough to stoke an economic revival after the end of almost three decades of civil war.
The Central Bank of Sri Lanka held the reverse repurchase rate at 11 percent and maintained the repurchase […]

The worst recession in half a century may be prolonged because consumers see few signs job losses and declines in home prices are ending, economists Nouriel Roubini and Robert Shiller said.
“The fundamental problem, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1933, is fear,” Shiller, a Yale University professor, said yesterday on Bloomberg Radio’s “Surveillance.” […]

The worst recession in half a century may be prolonged because consumers see few signs job losses and declines in home prices are ending, economists Nouriel Roubini and Robert Shiller said.
“The fundamental problem, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1933, is fear,” Shiller, a Yale University professor, said yesterday on Bloomberg Radio’s “Surveillance.” […]

A surge in China’s lending is boosting concern that attempts to revive the world’s third- largest economy will lead to bad debts and asset bubbles.
New loans rose almost fivefold in June from a year earlier to 1.53 trillion yuan ($224 billion), the central bank said on its Web site yesterday. The June number […]

The world’s most affluent nations will take decades to work off the biggest buildup in debt since World War II. The political costs may be permanent, laid bare at this week’s Group of Eight summit of leading industrial powers.
Bank bailouts and recession-fighting measures will explode the debt of the advanced economies to at […]

New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three biggest U.S. cities, saw an increase in population as falling housing prices slowed growth in the Florida and California suburbs that were leaders earlier in the decade, the U.S. Census Bureau said today.
“The housing bubble caused a migration bubble and it has burst,” said William […]

U.K. houses held their value for a second month in June as increased demand and a lack of supply supported residential prices, Hometrack Ltd. said.
The average cost of a home in England and Wales was 155,600 pounds ($257,000), the London-based property researcher said in an e-mailed statement today. They stopped falling in May […]