Aurelia Butler

TOKYO (Reuters) -A possible revision to a joint Japanese government and Bank of Japan (BOJ) statement that focuses on pulling the country out of deflation must be discussed with the new BOJ governor, Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki said.”What to do with the statement is something the government must discuss with the new governor,” Suzuki told parliament on Friday, adding that it was premature to say whether it actually needs to be revised as the government has yet to nominate the new BOJ chief.”But the goals mentioned in the joint statement, such as the need to pull Japan out of deflation and achieve stable economic growth, remain important policy challenges,” Suzuki said.The remarks came as the government intensifies its efforts to select a successor to BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, whose second, five-year term ends in April.Some analysts say a revision to the statement signed a decade ago would allow the BOJ to tweak its ultra-loose monetary policy more flexibly, and could heighten market expectations of a near-term end to its yield control policy.Under strong pressure by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to take bolder steps to beat deflation, the BOJ signed the joint statement with the government in 2013 and committed itself to achieve its 2% inflation target “at the earliest date possible”.Some officials of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s administration are keen to revise the statement that focuses on steps to beat deflation – a goal that has become out of sync with recent rises in inflation, sources have told Reuters. More

“The inflation data will get better to a level we need to worry about less than at present,” Minister Choo Kyung-ho said at a forum hosted by senior domestic media editors, while giving no specific forecast.South Korea’s consumer price index rose 5.2% in January from a year before, picking up speed from a 5.0% gain in December 2022 and above market expectations for 5.0% growth.Choo said he has been meeting frequently with the head of the central bank to exchange views on current issues, but declined to comment on interest rates, noting that monetary policy was the preserve of the Bank of Korea.He said an anticipated pick-up in China’s economic growth after its shift away from COVID-related restrictions would be positive for South Korea’s economy, although the country needs to continue efforts to diversify export markets. More

In a hawkish-sounding quarterly Statement on Monetary Policy, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) said domestically-sourced cost pressures were still picking even if consumer price inflation was a whole may have finally peaked last quarter. While growth in global goods prices had cooled this was yet to show clearly in Australia, while inflation in the service sector had climbed faster than expected.”The Board expects that further increases in interest rates will be needed to ensure that the current period of high inflation is only temporary,” said the RBA, implying two or more hikes were waiting in the wings.”The Board’s priority is to return inflation to target. High inflation makes life difficult for people and damages the functioning of the economy. And if high inflation were to become entrenched in people’s expectations, it would be very costly to reduce later.”On Tuesday, the RBA raised its cash rate for the ninth straight time to a fresh decade-high of 3.35%, bringing the total tightening since last May to a whopping 325 basis points.It also surprised markets by signalling further increases were needed, quashing talk of a pause and leading markets to sharply revise up their outlook for terminal rates to 4%.Consumer price inflation is running at a 32-year high of 7.8% and is now expected to only slow to 6.7% by June this year, up from a previous forecast of 6.3%. It should then slow further to the top of the RBA’s target range of 2-3% by mid-2025. The closely-watched trimmed mean measure of inflation will only slow to 6.2% by the middle of this year, compared with a previous forecast of 5.4%.Annual wage growth is expected to pick up to a peak of 4.2% at the end of this year, compared with the previous forecast of 3.9%, before easing back to 3.8% by mid 2025.The unemployment rate is expected to steadily increase to 4.4% by mid-2025, from the current 3.5%. All these forecasts are based on the technical assumption that interest rates peak at around 3.75% in mid-2023 before easing back to around 3% to June 2025.The bank also raised its forecast of economic growth this year to 1.6% this year, compared with 1.4% previously. China’s abrupt elimination of COVID curbs has added to growth in global demand, supporting Australia’s terms of trade and national income. The RBA also noted that the momentum in household consumption growth could be sustained for longer than expected, even as some are experiencing a painful squeeze on their budgets due to higher interest rates and the rising cost of living. More

(Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Thursday sanctioned Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) and its law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher for “delay, misdirection and frivolous arguments” in a data privacy lawsuit over the company’s sharing of user information with third-parties.U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco ordered Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and Gibson Dunn to pay about $925,000 over what he said was an effort to make the litigation unnecessarily difficult and expensive for the plaintiffs.Chhabria, who has long been critical of Gibson Dunn’s handling of the case, said the firm and Facebook mounted a “sustained, concerted, bad-faith effort to throw obstacle after obstacle in front of the plaintiffs—all in an attempt to push the plaintiffs into settling the case for less than they would have gotten otherwise.”Representatives for Gibson Dunn and Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The firm has argued in court filings that it followed court orders and has blamed the plaintiffs for issuing “unreasonable and incessant” demands for company documents. Los Angeles-founded Gibson Dunn has represented the company in numerous matters.Meta, Facebook’s parent company, agreed last year to pay $725 million to settle the lawsuit, which was sparked by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as 87 million users. The company did not admit wrongdoing.In Thursday’s decision, the judge faulted Meta and its lawyers for claiming they were only required to produce internal documents in the case about user data the company admitted it shared with third-parties. The court had ordered Facebook to turn over data it had collected on the plaintiffs in the case, regardless of whether it had been shared.The judge also accused Meta’s legal team of needlessly delaying turning over documents related to an internal investigation Facebook had commissioned into third-party apps that accessed user data.The case is IN RE: Facebook, INC. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 18-md-02843-VC.For plaintiffs: Derek Loeser of Keller Rohrback and Lesley Weaver of Bleichmar FontiFor Meta: Rosemarie Ring of Gibson Dunn More

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Finnish parliamentary groups are expected to discuss on Friday when to ratify NATO’s founding treaties, in a move that could lead the country to proceed with membership ahead of neighbouring Sweden, amid growing support among the Finnish public to go it alone. The two Nordic countries sought NATO membership shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, and while most member-states have ratified the applications, Turkey has yet to give its approval.”Our position on Finland is positive, but it is not positive on Sweden,” President Tayyip Erdogan said last week.Turkey’s differing view on Finnish and Swedish memberships is putting pressure on Finnish leaders to push ahead. A 53% majority of Finns polled on Feb. 2 for daily Ilta-Sanomat said they did not want Finland to wait for Sweden. Some 28% said it should. On Friday, parliamentary groups in Finland will decide whether parliament should ratify NATO’s founding treaties before it goes into recess on March 3, before a parliamentary election on April 2. If parliament on a later date votes in favour of approving the treaties, as it is widely expected to do, the president must proceed with the application within three months and as soon as all existing NATO members have also ratified Finland’s bid, which could effectively lead to proceeding with NATO membership without Sweden.For that to happen, Turkey and Hungary need to ratify the Finnish membership first and NATO to officially invite Finland as a member.Finland’s Chancellor of Justice Tuomas Poysti told Ilta-Sanomat the process would leave Finland some room to wait for Sweden if need be, but not endlessly. Officially, Finland has reaffirmed time and time again that it wants to join NATO with Sweden.Sweden is Finland’s closest defence ally. In case of a conflict with Russia, with which Finland shares a 1,300-km (800-mile) border, NATO would need Swedish territory to help Finland defend itself, for instance in terms of logistics.Ankara wants Helsinki and Stockholm in particular to take a tougher line against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is considered a terror group by Turkey and the European Union, and another group it blames for a 2016 coup attempt. More

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s wholesale prices in January rose 9.5% from a year earlier, data showed on Friday, adding to growing signs of inflationary pressure that could keep the central bank under pressure to phase out its massive stimulus programme.The increase in the corporate goods price index (CGPI), which measures the price companies charge each other for their goods and services, compared with a median market forecast for a 9.6% gain. It followed a revised 10.5% rise in December, Bank of Japan data showed.While global commodity inflation has run its course, companies continued to charge higher prices for products ranging from food, steel and chemical goods, the data showed.The data suggests that Japan’s core consumer inflation, which hit a 41-year high of 4.0% in December, will likely remain well above the central bank’s 2% target in coming months. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -SpaceX’s towering Super Heavy booster, one half of the company’s Starship rocket system, briefly roared to life for the first time on Thursday in a test-firing that puts the behemoth moon and Mars vehicle closer to its first orbital flight in the coming months.Thirty-one of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor rocket engines fired for roughly 10 seconds at SpaceX’s facilities in Boca Chica, Texas, the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, tweeted shortly after the test, shown during a livestream.”Team turned off 1 engine just before start & 1 stopped itself, so 31 engines fired overall,” Musk tweeted. “But still enough engines to reach orbit!”The engines were ignited in a roar of orange flames and billowing clouds of vapor while the 23-story-tall rocket remained bolted in place vertically atop a platform adjacent to a launch tower.When mated to its upper-stage Starship spacecraft, the entire vehicle will stand taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 meters) high, forming the centerpiece of Musk’s ambitions to eventually colonize Mars. But plans call for it to first play a leading role in NASA’s renewed human exploration of the moon.It was unclear whether SpaceX will decide to conduct another static-fire test of the Super Heavy, with all 33 engines, before the company attempts to launch the powerful, next-generation rocket for the first time in an uncrewed flight to space.That launch, a test mission lifting off from Texas and landing off the coast of Hawaii, could happen “in the next month or so,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told a conference on Wednesday, though the exact flight date hinged on the outcome of Thursday’s static fire test.”Keep in mind, this first one is really a test flight,” Shotwell said. “The real goal is to not blow up the launch pad, that is success.”A previous test firing of a Super Heavy booster in July of 2022 ended with the vehicle’s engine section exploding in flames. Before that, SpaceX had test-launched Starship’s top half in several “hop” flights to an altitude of roughly 6 miles to demonstrate that rocket’s landing abilities. All but one crashed.Thursday’s test-firing of the 31 Raptor engines appeared to set a new record for the most thrust ever produced by a single rocket – roughly 17 million pounds compared with 10.5 million pounds for the Russian N1, and 8 million pounds for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, livestream commentators for the space media group NASA Spaceflight said. They said it also marked the most rocket engines ever fired simultaneously, exceeding the 30 engines of the N1.Moreover, Super Heavy’s 33 engines will far surpass the thrust from the first stage of the Saturn V, the storied NASA rocket that sent humans to the moon during the Apollo program of the 1960s and ’70s.Starship’s development is funded partially by a $3 billion contract from NASA, which plans to use the SpaceX rocket in the next several years to land the first crew of astronauts on the moon since 1972, as part of the U.S. space agency’s multibillion-dollar Artemis program.On Wednesday, NASA engineers in Mississippi test-fired a redesigned version of the agency’s own rocket engines, the Aerojet Rocketdyne-built RS-25, which will power the SLS on future flights. SLS and Starship are the two spacecraft currently at the forefront of the Artemis program, which NASA said is aimed at establishing a permanent base on the moon as a stepping stone to human exploration of Mars.(Reporting and writing by Joey Roulette in Washington; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Christopher Cushing) More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Joe Biden, his aides and his Democratic allies are shrugging off polls showing doubts about his age and leadership as they plot his expected re-election campaign, and point instead to the U.S. president’s flinty State of the Union speech to Congress this week as a sign of his political resiliency. Biden, who turned 80 in November, is the oldest president to hold office. He and his Democratic Party are laying the groundwork for a campaign that would put him in office for a second, four-year term in 2025. Recent polls show aging leaders are a concern for Americans in general, and Biden’s age in particular worries Democratic voters.Asked about the age concerns in a Noticias Telemundo interview that aired Thursday, Biden said “Well, that’s not what I hear.” He added, “Look, do you know any polling that’s accurate these days? You all told me that there was no way we were going to do well in this off-year election. I told you from the beginning we’re going to do well.”Biden’s public approval rating was just 41% in a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll that closed on Sunday. That is close to the lowest level of his presidency, though similar to where former President Donald Trump was at the same time in his administration.Biden aides and advisors Reuters spoke to in recent days reiterated the idea that polling is irrelevant. Their reasoning: there is more than a year to go before ballots are cast, and U.S. political polls predicting a “red wave” of Republicans before the midterms were wrong. Instead, Biden and his team are studying polls showing the favorability of Biden’s message and the policies he is pushing, like higher taxes on companies and the rich, and lower insulin costs. They’re targeting key subsets of voters, such as those who flipped from supporting Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. “I feel good about where we are. I feel good about the way things are, and I feel good about the reception I get,” Biden said in the Telemundo interview. On Wednesday, Biden delivered a robust speech in the state of Wisconsin, which made such a flip in 2020, ribbing Republicans for heckling him over his remarks about some opposition party members’ Social Security plans, while reiterating a pledge to work with them at the same time. “People sent us a clear message: Fighting for the sake of fighting gets us nowhere. We are getting things done,” he said. SOTU DRAWS MILLIONS An estimated 23.4 million people watched the State of the Union, giving Biden one of his largest audiences of the year, and clips of an interchange between Biden and House Republicans circulating on social media may have drawn millions more viewers. How well he did depends on who you ask. A CNN poll conduced with 552 U.S. adults found that 72% regarded the speech positively. A Fox News-led focus group felt he didn’t address crime or education adequately. In swing state of Nevada, independents and moderates approved of Biden’s attacks on Republicans for threatening Social Security and Medicare benefits, and his pledge to cap insulin costs and make the wealthy pay their “fair share” in taxes, said Navigator Research, which hosted a small focus group. The left-leaning group’s research has been used before by the White House. Overall, Biden’s approval rating among the group rose from 31% to 52% during the speech, and six in ten liked the speech. His approval rating on handling of the economy rose from a net negative 38% to a positive 4%.However, Nevada voters are still finding it hard to feel good about the economy when they see prices for eggs and milk still rising, said Bryan Bennett, an adviser to Navigator. “It is hard for people to reconcile the personal economic indicators with the broader, more positive ones,” he said.Attacking Republicans for threatening Social Security and Medicare is expected to be particularly salient in competitive states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Florida with large proportions of elderly voters. Biden heads to Florida to talk about the issue on Thursday. More