US officials unveiled new steps on Monday to free up credit for crisis-hit small businesses a day after a meeting of top global policymakers pledged further efforts to tackle the economic malaise.
The US Treasury said it will move to ease a credit freeze to small businesses by pumping up to US$15 billion into the sector.
The unusual effort to buy up securities linked to small business loans aims to “jump-start” credit in the sector, which has been frozen because investors are unwilling to purchase bundled loans that are “securitized.”
US President Barack Obama, discussing the new effort, said it was being launched in response to a situation where “small business owners are really struggling even though they’re maintaining profitable businesses [because] their credit lines are being pulled.”
“This is still just going to be a first step in what is going to be a continuing effort to make sure that people get credit out there,” he said.
The action by the Treasury comes on top of a move by the Federal Reserve to pump up credit for business and consumers hurting from a global credit crunch, with the banking system reeling from massive losses linked to the US housing meltdown.
The move came after finance chiefs from the G20 economies meeting in the UK over the weekend to prepare for a summit on April 2 said their countries would take “whatever action is necessary” to fight the crisis.
But US appeals for governments in other leading economies to pump more public money into economic stimulus packages have been received coolly by France and Germany, which see tighter regulation as the solution.
CHINA’S AGREEMENT
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he believed China would agree on the need for new fiscal and monetary measures to tackle the global downturn at the upcoming G20 summit.
Brown was speaking after talks with European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso to prepare for the summit in London of the leading and fastest-emerging economies, which China will attend.
“I think there will be an agreement with China on the need to reform our international institutions to make them more adequate for the challenges of the times, and an agreement on the fiscal and monetary effort that is needed to get us through this downturn,” Brown said.
In Japan, embattled Prime Minister Taro Aso convened a panel of experts to gather ideas for a new stimulus package that media reports said may total about US$200 billion.
The talks started as the Cabinet Office in its latest monthly report said Japan’s economy was still “worsening rapidly” and “in a severe situation” — the same overall economic assessment as in the previous month.
This month’s report said corporate profits, exports and industrial output were all “decreasing very substantially,” the employment situation was “getting worse rapidly” and private consumption was “decreasing modestly.”
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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