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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StanX Long who wrote (58316)	1/2/2002 1:10:45 AM
From: StanX Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Well this doesn't sound good. ;0( Wednesday January 2, 10:24 AM GDP data prompts Singapore to trim currency trading band By Jacqueline Wong sg.news.yahoo.com SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A stable outlook for the recession hit Singapore economy, benign inflation and less volatile financial markets led the central bank on Wednesday to narrow the policy band it uses to manage the local currency. "We are restoring a narrower policy band as market and economic conditions have become less volatile," the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said in a statement after the issue of advance estimates for gross domestic product (GDP) data. The Singapore dollar was trading at 1.8490/00 against the U.S. dollar at 0140 GMT, up from 1.8500 before the release of the 2001 and fourth quarter GDP figures. The government said the economy was estimated to have contracted by 2.2 percent in 2001 and it fell seven percent in the fourth quarter in year-on-year terms. But the government said GDP was growing at 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter against the third on an annualised quarter-on-quarter basis. "In our assessment, the current level of the S$NEER (nominal effective exchange rate) is supportive of economic recovery and growth in a benign inflationary environment," the MAS said. The consumer price index was expected to average around one percent for 2001 while inflationary pressures would be largely absent from the economy this year, the MAS said. IMPROVED ECONOMIC OUTLOOK The central bank shifted to a neutral exchange rate policy in July 2001 as prospects for the economy at that time had worsened significantly for the second half of last year. It then widened the policy band for trading of the Singapore dollar in October to allow greater flexibility in managing the exchange rate after the attacks in the United States on September 11 resulted in more uncertainty. But the situation has turned around since October, with some signs the economy may be bottoming out. Despite the Singapore dollar's weakness against the U.S. dollar in the second half of 2001, analysts said they did not expect its trade-weighted value to fluctuate much and had been expecting the MAS to stick with its neutral bias in a policy statement due to come in January.