Aurelia Butler

COJIMAR, Cuba (Reuters) – Since the days of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, whose main character toiled with oars to catch a marlin, few Cubans have enjoyed the luxury of a motor boat to chase the bounty of fish that lie just offshore of their island home.That appears set to change. For the first time in decades, the island’s communist-run government has granted authority to Cubans to import outboard motors of less than 10 horsepower for use on small boats and has said it will cut red tape to fast-track the process.One fisherman already mulling an upgrade is Maydel Reinaldo Hechevarría, a 41-year old street vendor from the port of Jaimanitas, west of Havana. He said he has fished since he was a boy but that lacking a motor, his options were few.”When we row there are many days we cannot go out,” said Hechevarría, who told Reuters he began the process to import a motor just days after the announcement last week. “I see more possibilities now.”Limits on boat building and imports have long restricted private commercial and recreational fishermen like Hechevarría to vessels that predate Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, much the same as the island’s candy-colored vintage American cars. But those limits, presumably aimed at reducing attempts at the dangerous crossing north to the United States by sea, also hamper fishermen´s ability to catch fish to feed the island´s 11 million inhabitants.Even before Castro´s revolution, most Cubans, like Hemingway´s Santiago, in “The Old Man and the Sea”, were too poor to afford a motor. Little has changed since.”This is a solution for some but it doesn´t resolve the necessities of all fishermen,” said Fernando de la Rosa, 58, who oversees the Jaimanitas fishing marina, a ragtag collection of boats tucked into a palm and mangrove lined creek.Larger-scale commercial fishermen around Havana told Reuters the measure was a step in the right direction but still fell short of what is needed to modernize the fleet and boost catches.Cojimar fisherman Abilio Alcantara, 53, captains a decades-old 27-foot Japanese-built boat that requires far more power than the 10hp motor authorized by the government, he told Reuters.”The measure is a good one,” he said. “But we need motors of at least 80 or 90 horsepower.”Alcantara said concerns that outboard motors would be used by fishermen to migrate north to the United States were overblown. “I have been on my boat for 30 years,” Alcantara said. “If I haven’t left by now, I’m not going anywhere.”Since October, the U.S. Coast Guard has picked up more than 1,000 Cubans on the way to South Florida in rafts, homemade boats and even on surfboards — the largest number since fiscal year 2017, agency records show.A grinding economic crisis has led to food and medicine shortages and prompted many Cubans to seek to immigrate from the poor Caribbean island. More

TOKYO (Reuters) – Haruhiko Kuroda built a career battling a strong yen and the Bank of Japan governor is unlikely to change course in his final year at the helm, eight sources said, despite political pressure to acknowledge that the weak currency is now a problem.Sources familiar with the bank’s thinking and people close to Kuroda, whose decade in charge ends next April, said he is likely to protect his legacy by avoiding tweaks to a monetary policy that continues to treat a strong yen as enemy No. 1.The BOJ’s dovish signals may give markets a chance to drive down the yen further, as prospects of steady policy tightening by the Federal Reserve widen the Japan-U.S. interest rate gap.”The BOJ looks at inflation, not yen moves, in guiding policy,” one of the sources said.Kuroda’s career as a finance bureaucrat was marked by fighting rises in the yen that threatened Japan’s export-reliant economy.After landing the BOJ top job in 2013, he maintained that stance and engineered a dramatic yen fall by pumping in massive monetary stimulus, a policy that is considered among the key successes of former premier Shinzo Abe’s pro-growth “Abenomics”.Now, Kuroda is increasingly alone in repeating the benefits of a weak currency, as government officials escalate their warnings against excessive yen declines that help push up import costs and consumer prices for energy and food.The weak yen has emerged as a political hot-button as lawmakers demand measures to cushion the blow from rising inflation ahead of upper house elections due in July.The mood among companies is starting to change, too. Kengo Sakurada, head of business lobby Keizai Doyukai, said on Tuesday that current yen levels were hurting retailers and can “hardly be seen as appropriate”.Even former finance ministry colleagues, most of whom like Kuroda struggled to combat a strong yen, are beginning to brand currency weakness as indicative of Japan’s waning economic might.Kuroda appears unfazed, and continues to argue that while a weak yen may hurt households and retailers, the benefits to the economy outweigh the cost.The BOJ is still relentless in defending its 0% cap for long-term interest rates, set under its ultra-easy policy.Undeterred by the yen’s slide to a six-year low against the dollar on Monday, it offered unlimited, fixed-rate purchases of 10-year government bonds through Thursday and ramped up bond-buying for other maturities.”In a sense, the BOJ is driving down the yen with unlimited bond buying,” said former top currency diplomat Naoyuki Shinohara, who was Kuroda’s colleague at the finance ministry. “It probably doesn’t see the yen’s current levels as dangerous.”UNWAVERING AND PRAGMATICSo far, there is little sign of discontent within the BOJ over Kuroda’s stance. Dovish board members, such as Goushi Kataoka, see the weak yen as a key channel through which the bank’s easy policy boosts growth.A summary of opinions of a March meeting made no mention of the pros and cons of a weak yen.Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s administration meanwhile continues to defend the BOJ’s ultra-easy policy as a necessary support to a still-fragile economic recovery.”It’s hard to tighten monetary policy to deal with cost-push inflation, which means monetary policy must remain loose,” said deputy chief cabinet secretary Seiji Kihara, who is considered among the premier’s closest aides.Pressure to tweak the yield cap could become overwhelming if the yen, now hovering near 122 to the dollar, plunges to around 130, some analysts say.But Eisuke Sakakibara, who is known as “Mr. Yen” for master-minding currency interventions in the 1990s, argues that hiking BOJ interest rates will do little to stop yen declines.For now, Kuroda is expected to ensure the BOJ stays the course on ultra-easy policy. While political pressure may mount for him to budge, current law does not give the government power to fire the central bank governor. Kuroda is unlikely to be reappointed, having already served an unusually long term.Kuroda’s predecessor, Masaaki Shirakawa, voluntarily left the job several weeks before his term ended, after facing a barrage of criticism for doing too little, too late to beat deflation.Stepping down early, or hiking interest rates in the face of political pressure, is not in Kuroda’s nature, say people who have regular interactions with the governor.”He may be under heat but that’s probably not a concern to him,” one of the people said. “He’s extremely pragmatic and unwavering, so I can’t see why he would choose to step down or tweak policy now.” More

Consumer prices in the eurozone rose by a record 7.5 per cent in March from a year ago, piling pressure on the European Central Bank to tighten its ultra-loose monetary policy faster than planned.The biggest factors driving up eurozone inflation were higher energy and food prices, which have surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit supplies of oil, gas and other commodities.The flash estimate for the increase in the harmonised index of consumer prices in March compared with the earlier record of 5.9 per cent set in February and was well above the 6.6 per cent average forecasts of economists polled by Reuters. The rise in eurozone consumer prices by well above the ECB’s 2 per cent target has prompted some of its policymakers to call for it to cool demand by bringing forward the plan to end its net asset purchases and to raise interest rates for the first time in more than a decade.Investors are pricing in 0.63 percentage points of rate rises by the ECB before the end of this year, which would take its main deposit rate back into positive territory for the first time since 2014, up from its current all-time low of minus 0.5 per cent.Several ECB policymakers have said they expect it to raise rates this year and some, such as Klaas Knot of the Netherlands, have said it could do so twice this year.“We think that the ECB will soon conclude that it can’t wait any longer before starting to raise interest rates,” said Jack Allen-Reynolds, senior economist at Capital Economics, predicting the ECB would raise rates three times this year by a total of 0.75 percentage points.But the central bank has so far only announced plans to stop net bond purchases by September, when it will decide if inflation will stay strong enough to justify a rate rise. Some of its policymakers worry the war in Ukraine could plunge Europe into recession this year, while the sharp increase in the cost of living could undermine any rebound in consumer demand generated by the lifting of coronavirus restrictions.“In current conditions, it is especially important to remain data-dependent and for optionality to be two-sided,” said ECB chief economist Philip Lane in a speech on Thursday.Lane signalled the unwinding of its ultra-loose policy could be accelerated if needed, to counter “de-anchored inflation expectations, an intensification in catch-up wage dynamics or a persistent deterioration in supply capacity”. But he added that the “normalisation” of monetary policy could be slowed down if “the energy price shock and the Russia-Ukraine war were to result in a significant deterioration in macroeconomic prospects”.In March, energy prices across the euro area rose by an all-time high of 44.7 per cent from a year earlier, while unprocessed food prices advanced 7.8 per cent, Eurostat said on Friday. Industrial goods prices were 3.4 per cent higher and services prices climbed 2.7 per cent.Even excluding the more volatile energy, food, alcohol and tobacco prices, core inflation increased from 2.7 per cent in February to 3 per cent in March — underlining how price pressures are becoming more broad-based. The highest national annual inflation rate in the eurozone was in Lithuania at 15.6 per cent, while Malta had the lowest at 4.6 per cent. The surge in inflationary pressures was underlined by the 2.5 per cent rise in eurozone consumer prices between February and March, a record month-on-month increase.Inflation is expected to continue rising as the Ukraine war adds to turmoil in energy markets and combines with China’s zero-Covid lockdowns of key industrial areas to intensify the supply chain problems that are leaving companies short of materials.Manufacturers in the eurozone reported the biggest price increases for products leaving their factories since such data started to be collected in the 1990s, according to the latest purchasing managers’ survey published by S&P Global on Friday. More