Day: October 25, 2021

Speakers at a function here yesterday

underscored the need for providing quality seed to farmers to help them boost

production of agri-crops to ensure sustainable food security in the country.

“Quality seeds is the pre-requisite to get desired output from the crops

including high value crop paddy and save the farmers from being cheated”,

they said.

They made the comments while addressing a Seed Retailers Workshop at the

Federation hall room of Khordo-Komorpur union under Sadullapur upazila in the

district on Sunday.

In cooperation with IRRI (International Rice Research Institute), RDRS

Bangladesh, a reputed national NGO of the country, organized the function

under Accelerated Genetic Gains in Rice Alliance (AGGRi) project.

Deputy Director (DD) of the department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) Md

Belal Uddin addressed the function as the chief guest while upazila

agriculture officer Md. Khajanur Rahman spoke as special guest at the

programme.

Presided over by federation chairman Gouri Rani, the function was also

addressed, among others, by sub assistant agriculture officers Md. Younus and

Nazmul Hossain and agriculture officer of RDRS Bangladesh Fazlul Karim and

field facilitator of the project Akbar Hossain.

Earlier, a welcome speech was delivered by agriculture officer of the

project Anup Kumar Ghosh.

The speakers in their speech urged the seed retailers to sell quality seed

of all crops so that the farmers could produce crops without any troubles and

get the desired output.

DD of the DAE Md Belal Uddin in his speech suggested the farmers to produce

seed and preserve it at farmer’s level to attain bumper food production.

As many as 30 seed retailers, federation members, Agri-entrepreneurs, local

elite and journalists attended the workshop.

Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)

Mobile court in separate drives

arrested 59 fishermen along with current net and Hilsha in the last 24 hours

from the rivers Padma and Meghna in the district.

Later, the mobile court sentenced them to different terms of

imprisonment for defying the government’s ongoing 22-day ban on Hilsha

fishing.

A total of 59 fishermen were arrested with 65 kgs of mother Hilsha and

2.882 lakh meters of banned current nets during the drives, said District

Fisheries Officer Pranab Kumar Karmakar.

The mobile court sentenced 53 fishermen to different terms of jail and

fined six fishermen Taka five thousand each, he said.

The seized nets were destroyed and the seized Hilsha has been

distributed to the orphanages, madrasas and poor people in the area.

The government has imposed a 22-day ban starting from October 4 on

catching, selling, storing and transporting Hilsha, to ensure safe spawning

of the Mother Hilsha, during its peak breeding period.

Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)

Asian markets were mixed Monday

following last week’s gains with investors keeping a worried eye on a fresh

Covid outbreak in China that could drag on the already stuttering economy.

Long-running worries about inflation continued to cast a shadow over

trading floors, though a healthy batch of earnings have tempered those

concerns in the past couple of weeks.

Reporting by tech titans including Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft

are on the agenda this week, and will be closely followed for an idea about

what impact supply chain snarls and rising prices is having on their bottom

lines.

Their forward guidance will also be of interest as they contemplate

tighter central bank monetary policies and a possible hike in interest rates

next year. Tech firms are usually more susceptible to higher borrowing costs.

News that troubled China Evergrande had paid interest due on a bond before

Saturday’s deadline provided a much-needed boost to confidence though it

remains to be seen whether it can meet obligations on other notes due before

the end of the year. Hong Kong and Shanghai fluctuated through the early

session, with traders keeping tabs on the latest Delta variant outbreak in

mainland China, which comes just over three months before the country hosts

the Winter Olympics.

The latest spike has forced authorities to reimpose strict containment

measures, but there are fears of a wider lockdown which would weigh on

economic growth. Recent outbreaks this year played a role in the below-par

expansion seen in the third quarter.

There were gains in Sydney, Seoul and Jakarta but Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei

and Manila fell.

Traders are preparing for the Federal Reserve to join several other

central banks around the world in winding down the massive financial support

put in place at the outset of the pandemic.

Boss Jerome Powell said last week that the bank’s vast bond-buying should

now be tapered, with expectations he will begin the pullback as early as next

month, though he was not ready to hike borrowing costs yet.

“The risks are clearly now to longer and more persistent bottlenecks, and

thus to higher inflation,” he said Friday.

“I would say our policy is well-positioned to manage a range of plausible

outcomes,” he said. “I do think it’s time to taper and I don’t think it’s

time to raise rates.”

Oil prices pressed higher, with Brent at a three-year high above $86,

while WTI was within sight of $85 for the first time since October 2014.

The latest rise comes after Saudi Arabia said OPEC and other major

producers would be cautious in lifting output despite surging demand, warning

that the pandemic still posed a threat to the outlook.

The Turkish lira tumbled more than one percent against the dollar after

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for the expulsion of ambassadors from

10 countries, including Germany and the United States, who had appealed for

the release of a jailed civil society leader.

Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)

Shares of embattled Chinese developer

Evergrande rose Monday after it said it had resumed work on more than 10

projects, as it sought to soothe fears about its debt struggles.

The liquidity crisis at one of the nation’s biggest property developers

has hammered investor sentiment, rattled China’s crucial real estate market

and fuelled talk of spillover into the wider economy.

But the firm — drowning in a sea of debt worth more than $300 billion —

last week paid interest on an offshore bond just before a Saturday deadline,

averting a default and giving it a much-needed reprieve.

Evergrande was reported to have missed several offshore bond payments and

while it had a 30-day grace period on some of them, there had been a general

expectation it would not be able to meet its obligations.

And on Monday investors welcomed an announcement that its Shenzhen

operations had “resumed work and production for more than 10 projects in six

locations”.

Shares in the firm rallied more than four percent in early trade.

The group had 778 projects spanning 233 cities in China as at end-June,

according to its latest interim report.

Work at some sites had been halted in recent months, however, while

suppliers and contractors complained the company had yet to pay them.

The firm has been plunged into crisis since Beijing began last year

clamping down on the country’s colossal property sector — estimates say it

accounts for a quarter of the economy — in a bid to rein in excessive debt.

But the measures to restrict borrowing cut off companies’ ability to

complete projects.

Anxious homebuyers earlier told AFP they had turned up at unfinished sites

to demand information.

“Since the start of the year, strict regulation of the property market has

plunged Evergrande into a crisis vortex,” the company said in a statement on

its WeChat account Sunday.

“How the company will resume work and production on hundreds of projects

across the country, and deliver buildings on schedule, affects the nerves of

the whole society,” added Evergrande.

In a separate statement it provided progress updates on specific projects

and said that “guaranteeing the delivery of buildings” was core to the

company’s work.

Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)

HSBC is emerging from its coronavirus

and restructuring troubles to become more reliably profitable, boss Noel

Quinn said Monday as he announced the start of a $2 billion share buyback.

The Asia-reliant lender had a tumultuous 2020 as its fortunes took a

hammering from both the coronavirus and simmering geopolitical tensions.

Quinn has since overseen a dramatic restructuring, slashing the bank’s

workforce by about 35,000 and refocusing on its most profitable areas in Asia

and the Middle East, a tactic he said was now paying dividends.

“While we retain a cautious outlook on the external risk environment, we

believe that the lows of recent quarters are behind us,” Quinn wrote in a

note attached to the bank’s third-quarter results.

“This confidence, together with our strong capital position, enables us to

announce a share buyback of up to $2 billion, which we expect to commence

shortly,” he added.

The results statement showed HSBC’s pre-tax profit more than doubled on-

year in the third quarter to $5.4 billion. Profit after tax came in at $4.2

billion, up from $2.2 billion the same period last year.

HSBC makes 90 percent of its profit in Asia, with China and Hong Kong the

major drivers of growth.

In February it published a new strategy laying out plans to redouble its

attempt to seize more of the Asian market.

Weighed down by low interest rates, it is planning to seek out more fee-

based income, especially wealth management for Asia’s increasingly affluent.

Earlier this year the bank sold its 90 branches in the United States and

completed a long-running disposal of its unprofitable French retail business.

While all banks were hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, HSBC also had to

deal with another added wrinkle — geopolitical tensions.

HSBC’s historical and present-day connections to China are both its major

selling point and a source of vulnerability.

It has found itself more at risk than most global banks to the increasingly

frayed relationship between China and western powers — especially after

Beijing imposed a draconian security law on Hong Kong last year.

HSBC endorsed the security law, a move that led to criticism from lawmakers

in Britain and the United States, and has frozen the accounts of some Hong

Kong democracy activists at the request of local authorities.

At the same time the lender has found itself called out by Chinese state

media for providing information that helped lead to the arrest in Canada of a

top Huawei executive.

HSBC says it has to obey the laws in each jurisdiction it operates in.

Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)

Pressure is growing on the European

Central Bank to respond to rising inflation in the eurozone, as its

counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom signal willingness

to take action.

ECB policymakers will meet on Thursday, with markets hoping for hints on

when the bank might start raising historically low interest rates or tweak

the pace of bond buying under its massive pandemic-era stimulus programme.

Bottlenecks have pushed up prices and pinched industrial production in the

eurozone, drawing a tightrope for policymakers to walk as withdrawing

stimulus to quash inflation risks further crimping the economic recovery.

In September, prices in the euro area rose 3.4 percent year on year, a 13-

year high pushed by the cost of energy, and well above the bank’s two-percent

target.

At the same time, material shortages linked to the pandemic have stalled

the economic recovery in parts of the eurozone.

Eurozone business sentiment in October was at its lowest point since April,

according to an IHS Markit survey published last week, with shortages being

felt particularly in European powerhouse Germany and its vital automotive

sector.

President Christine Lagarde has however said the ECB would not “overreact”

to what the bank’s economists see as “transitory” inflation driven by one-off

pandemic effects.

– ‘Getting closer’ –

At the end of September, the heads of the world’s biggest central banks

came together at the ECB’s monetary policy summit to discuss the problems

facing them.

The US Federal Reserve was “getting closer” to meeting its targets to start

winding down its own stimulus programme, its chair Jerome Powell said in a

panel discussion with Lagarde and colleagues from the UK and Japan.

Members of its policy-making committee also expect the Fed to start raising

interest rates at the end of 2022 — a prospect which has yet to officially

materialise at the ECB as the bank’s medium-term inflation forecasts continue

to sit below its target.

The Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said in mid-October that his

institution “will have to act” on inflation, bringing forward expectations of

a rise in interest rates.

Other central banks within the European Union have responded aggressively

to rising prices.

The Polish central bank hiked interest rates at the beginning of October

for the first time in almost a decade, while its Czech counterpart raised

rates sharply in September to tame soaring inflation.

– Zen master –

Despite some dissent among members of the governing council, the ECB seemed

“pretty zen”, said Bruno Cavalier, economist at Oddo.

In a letter last week announcing his resignation to colleagues, Jens

Weidmann, the president of the German central bank and a prominent advocate

of tight monetary policy, said it would be “decisive” for the ECB’s strategy

“not to lose sight of future inflation risks”.

Upwards pressure on prices would however “largely fade out over the course

of next year,” Isabel Schnabel, who sits on the executive board of the ECB,

said earlier this month.

The ECB has long held its interest rates at historic lows, including a

negative bank deposit rate that means lenders pay to park excess cash at the

ECB.

While markets are pricing in a small rates rise in 2022, analysts at ING

doubted that the first increase would come “before late 2023”.

The ECB’s 25-member governing council left interest rates untouched, but

dialled back its bond-buying scheme at its last meeting in September.

The 1.85-trillion-euro ($2.15-trillion) pandemic emergency bond-buying

programme (PEPP) is the ECB’s main crisis-fighting tool, aimed at keeping

borrowing costs low to stoke economic growth.

The expectation is that the scheme will end in March, but ideas are

percolating amongst observers and the central bank’s policymakers as to how

existing schemes could be modified to maintain support.

“Flexibility” had been the success of the pandemic programme, France’s

central bank boss Francois Villeroy de Galhau said earlier this month.

Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)