PrefBlog

There are threats of inflation in Asia:

The Bank of Thailand and Bank of Korea will each raise key interest rates this week by a quarter percentage point, median estimates in Bloomberg News surveys of economists show. Malaysia may also be approaching the end of its pause in boosting borrowing costs, as four of 12 analysts polled see a March 11 move, the highest such share since the last increase, in July.
….
The region’s economies are strong enough to withstand the impact of faster inflation, the Asian Development Bank said last week.

“The region is particularly prone to food and oil price shocks as a greater percentage of household income is spent on food and transportation,” said Vishnu Varathan, an economist in Singapore at Capital Economics (Asia) Pte.
…
Diminished resistance to currency gains in China may have a knock-on effect throughout Asia as the continent’s biggest economy also seeks to contain price pressures. People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said last month in Paris that his nation may use means “including rates and currency” to curb increases in food and home prices.

WordPress.org was attacked by hackers in China recently. I wondered how one defends against this and found a paper by S S Nagamuthu Krishnan and Dr. V. Saravanan titled DDoS Defense Mechanism by applying stamps. Precious in places (‘Oh, do be a good netizen while munching your granola’) and, naturally enough, veering occasionally into jargon, but they do achieve one of their major objectives in the paper addressing a major problem:

This was a major event, covered in the major news media. They have done an excellent job in their coverage; as far as it has gone, their coverage has been accurate. The problem is, their coverage hasn’t been sufficiently detailed to explain why we cannot track down the people committing these attacks, and why we can’t defend against them. There’s a good reason for these omissions: the attack is subtle, and understanding how it works well enough to understand why we can’t cope today, and what will have to change before we can, requires a more detailed explanation of how the Internet is constructed than the mass media are prepared to deliver to their audiences.

It was a mixed day on the Canadian preferred share market, as PerpetualDiscounts gained 6bp, FixedResets lost 8bp and DeemedRetractibles were down 11bp. Volume was average, but there were some nice blocks changing hands – all courtesy of Nesbitt, which shut out the rest of the street on the Volume Highlights table.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.