HONG KONG — China has bought more than $1 trillion in American debt, but as the global downturn has intensified, Beijing is starting to keep more of its money at home – a shift that could pose some challenges to the U.S. government in the near future but eventually may even produce salutary effects on the world economy. At first glance, the declining Chinese appetite for U.S. debt – apparent in a series of hints from Chinese policy makers over the past two weeks, with official statistics due for release in the next few days – comes at an inopportune time. On Tuesday, the U.S. president-elect, Barack Obama, said Americans should get used to the prospect of ‘trillion-dollar deficits for years to come’ as he seeks to finance an $800 billion economic stimulus package. Normally, China would be the most avid taker of the debt required to pay for those deficits, mainly short-term Treasury securities. In the past five years, China has spent as much as one-seventh of its entire economic output on the purchase of foreign debt – largely U.S. Treasury bonds and American mortgage-backed securities. But now, Beijing is seeking to pay for its own […]
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected. The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it. Of course, sound waves can’t travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can’t very efficiently. But radio waves can. Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum. Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss. But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected. There is ‘something new and interesting going on in the universe,’ said Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE […]
PARIS – The leaders of France and Germany appeared to put disagreements over economic policy behind them Thursday, calling on the U.S. to join global efforts to address the financial crisis. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, leading a two-day conference with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the future of capitalism, said the crisis has shown that no country can go it alone on economic policy. ‘In the 21st century, there it is no longer a single nation who can say what we should do or what we should think,’ he said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the system ‘cannot continue as it is’ and called for better-regulated financial markets. European leaders will meet in Berlin before the G-20 summit in London to decide a common approach as global leaders gear up for a second meeting on the global financial crisis, Sarkozy said. Measures will be taken at the G-20 meeting in London on April 2, Sarkozy promised, saying ‘we cannot accept the status quo.’ He called for closer cooperation on economic policy, saying: ‘We should discuss how each of us is managing his currency, his interest rates.’ The leaders of France and […]
Fears of a deep chill spread across Europe yesterday after a row between Russia and Ukraine over gas prices cut supplies to the rest of the continent on a day of plummeting temperatures and heavy snowfalls. The European Union said the situation was ‘completely unacceptable’ as thousands of businesses were urged to switch fuels, and households struggled to keep warm in sub-zero temperatures. But there was no sign of an end to the standoff between Russia’s energy monopoly Gazprom and Ukraine, locked in battle since New Year’s Day. Gazprom stopped pumping gas to Ukraine for domestic consumption on 1 January after the two countries failed to agree on a fixed price for 2009. The pipelines that cross Ukraine also carry gas to Europe but that continued to flow, until Moscow accused Ukraine of siphoning off Europe’s fuel and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin retaliated by ordering Gazprom to cut EU-bound exports by the amount being stolen. Yesterday Russia stopped gas supplies through Ukraine to Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia. The government of Slovakia declared a national emergency; Austria and Italy reported falls of 90 per cent; France said Russian supplies had tailed off 70 […]
CANBERRA — Climate change and rising sea levels pose one of the biggest threats to security in the Pacific and may also spark a global conflict over energy reserves under melting Arctic ice, according to Australia’s military. A confidential security review by Australia’s Defence Force, completed in 2007 but obtained in summary by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, said environmental stress had increased the risk of conflicts in the Pacific over resources and food. But the biggest threat of global conflict currently lay beneath the Arctic as melting icecaps gave rise to an international race for undersea oil and gas deposits, it said. ‘Environmental stress, caused by both climate change and a range of other factors, will act as a threat multiplier in fragile states around the world, increasing the chances of state failure,’ said the summary, published in the Herald on Wednesday. ‘The Arctic is melting, potentially making the extraction of undersea energy deposits commercially viable. Conflict is a remote possibility if these disputes are not resolved peacefully,’ the assessment said. The ‘Climate Change, The Environment, Resources And Conflict’ summary report was obtained under Freedom of Information laws which allow Australians to access official […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
