Asian stocks and the won plunged to 10-month lows after a report that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il ordered his military to prepare for combat last week. The euro weakened and commodities declined on concern Europe’s debt crisis will spread. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index dropped 3.1 percent to 109.24 a 1:30 p.m. in Tokyo, set for [...]

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Investor Marc Faber said China’s economy will slow and possibly “crash” within a year as declines in stock and commodity prices signal the nation’s property bubble is set to burst. The Shanghai Composite Index has failed to regain its 2009 high while industrial commodities and shares of Australian resource exporters are acting “heavy,” Faber said. The opening [...]

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Indonesia’s central bank may refrain from raising interest rates from a record low this week, betting that inflation isn’t yet enough of a threat to require higher borrowing costs. Bank Indonesia will keep its reference rate unchanged at 6.5 percent for an eighth straight month tomorrow, according to 16 of 17 economists in a Bloomberg [...]

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March 29 (Bloomberg) — China’s banking regulator ordered lenders to take more care when making real-estate loans, widening efforts to prevent property speculators from causing asset bubbles and bad debt. Banks should not lend to developers found by state agencies to have held land without building houses, the government said in a statement posted online late on [...]

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China’s yuan is facing increasing pressure to appreciate because of a widening interest-rate differential, the country’s top currency regulator said in a statement. Speculative capital is flowing into China disguised as foreign direct investment and trade accounts through “underground money shops,” Yi Gang, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said at a briefing in Beijing [...]

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Four strategists offer their views on the key factors that will drive foreign exchange movements here in the next 12 months. WHILE 2009 is often remembered for the unexpected economic rebound, the period also saw significantly higher volatility in the foreign exchange markets as the selldown in stocks swiftly hit the currency markets full-force. This [...]

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HONG KONG : Hong Kong stocks have come under pressure amid worries over further credit tightening measures by China. The Hang Seng is down by some 8 per cent for the year, and 13 per cent lower than its peak in mid-November 2009. Market watchers have said they expect further weakness in the coming sessions [...]

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HONG KONG: The IMF chief said Asia may need to erect temporary capital controls, warning of the potential for new economic bubbles as speculative money floods into the region. Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the global economy looked on course to beat the 3.1 percent growth forecast currently expected by the International Monetary Fund for 2010, as [...]

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WASHINGTON : The lead author of a World Bank report on the global economy published Wednesday said the bank sees “signs of bubbles” in the Chinese economy, a problem he said the Chinese government acknowledges. “We can already see some signs of bubbles and signs of tensions in the Chinese economy, in particular in the [...]

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Taipei: The next decade could be a “Golden Age” for Asia. Dr Tony Tan said this is based on the strong fundamentals in Asia that sees it recovering well from the Great Financial Crisis of 2008/9. Dr Tan, deputy chairman and executive director of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) put forward the view [...]

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