LONDON, Oct. 13--Oil prices have reached another record--surging past $84 a barrel for the first time. US sweet, light crude jumped as much as 97 cents to trade briefly at $84.05 a barrel in New York on supply fears before falling back to $83.69, BBC reported.
Fears that world energy supplies will reach critical levels this winter rose on low US crude stockpiles and fears that supply from Iraq could be hit. London Brent Crude jumped 40 cents to trade at $80.55.
There are mounting concerns that Turkey could invade the north of Iraq imminently to target the Kurdistan Workers Party after a number of rebel attacks that have killed 15 Turkish soldiers since Sunday.
Iraq has the world’s third largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and Iran and some of its largest oil fields are in the north of the country, near its border with Turkey.
But many analysts doubted that the supply of oil would be affected even if Turkey does get parliamentary approval for a cross-border military operation to hunt down rebels. Instead, they believed that rising tensions in the region encouraged commodity traders to bid up the oil price, which jumped on Thursday after it emerged that US crude oil stockpiles fell last week.
The US department of energy said US crude oil stocks fell by 1.7 million barrels, in contrast to analyst expectations for a rise. This takes crude inventories in the US to their lowest level since January as the weather turns colder and demand for heating oil increases, a report by the US Energy Information Administration showed.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed in September to boost crude supplies by 500,000 barrels a day starting in November.
But there is much debate over whether the increase will be sufficient to cater for demand levels in the winter months.

Gold rose as high as $749.3/oz--its highest since January 1980.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa,
Oct. 13--Gold prices surged Thursday to a 28-year high and platinum hit record peak--boosted by the weaker dollar--while the South African bourse company JSE closed at another record high because of strong commodity prices.
Boosted by the weaker dollar, spot gold rose as high as $749.3/oz--its highest since January 1980--and was quoted at $748.7/oz up from $738.8/oz on Wednesday in New York, www.allafrica.com reported.
Platinum rose to match a record reached in November last year at $1395/oz after earlier rising to a new record of $1396/oz.
Resources lifted South African stocks to a new record despite the market giving up some gains after the central bank hiked interest rates by 50 basis points.
The rand surged to a 16-month high on the rates decision as investors, banking on a no-change stance, were caught in long dollars, dealers said.
The JSE blue chip top 40 index closed 1.18 percent firmer at 28762.62 points after losing more than 250 points following the rate increase. It had touched a record high of 28957.74 points.
The broader all share index added 1.07 percent to 31531.05 points, having earlier hit an all-time peak of 31728.18.
“The market overcame the negative interest rate hike and the stronger rand and benefited from strong commodity prices. The biggest market driver was the dollar, which boosted the price of gold to a record high,“ PSG Konsult analyst Viv Govender said. Govender said that the market was in a protracted period of global gold strength.
“The initial reaction on the interest rate decision saw banks, industrial and retail shares weaken. It was a negative for them, but probably this was a knee-jerk reaction--as long as overseas markets are rising, this market will play catch-up,“ Ferdi Heyneke, a portfolio manager at Afrifocus Securities said.
Traders cited high metal prices, merger and acquisition talk swirling around the sector as pushing shares higher.

WASHINGTON,
Oct. 13--The gap between America’s richest and poorest is at its widest in at least 25 years, with the wealthiest taking home a record share of the nation’s income that exceeds even the previous high in 2000.
According to recent data from the Internal Revenue Service, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all US income earned in 2005. That is a significant increase from 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of the nation’s income, Reuters reported.
The previous high over the past 25 years, when such data were compiled, was in 2000 when a bull market brought the figure up to 20.81 percent.
The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, said the wealthy benefited in 2005 from a healthy, growing economy and higher-than-average price inflation.
The IRS data included all of the 132.6 million tax returns filed in 2005 with a positive adjusted gross income, or AGI, also including people who did not earn enough to owe taxes.
AGI is a figure used to calculate an individual’s income tax liability and includes all gross income adjusted by certain allowed deductions, such as moving expenses, health savings account deductions, alimony paid and retirement contributions.
In 2005, 90.6 million people who filed tax returns paid taxes into the Treasury, and 42 million with a positive AGI used exemptions, deductions and tax credits to reduce their federal income tax liability to zero.
Democratic US presidential candidates have raised the widening income gap as a campaign issue, proposing to raise taxes on wealthier Americans to pay for programs that would benefit lower-income families.
To make the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans in 2005, a taxpayer had to earn at least $364,657. That figure is an increase from 2004, when the cut-off point stood at $328,049. In 2005, the top 50 percent of American earners brought in 87.17 percent of the nation’s income, also an all-time high for the data available.
The previous high for that figure was also in 2000, when the richest 50 percent of Americans earned 87.01 percent of the income.

Dollar and Yuan banknotes at a currency souvenir shop in Beijing

BEIJING, Oct. 13--China’s foreign exchange reserves, already the world’s largest, surpassed $1.43 trillion at the end of September, the central bank said Friday. The figure was up 45.1 percent from a year earlier, the central bank said in a statement posted on its website, AFP reported.
The news came the same day that the government said the trade surplus, the main source of forex reserve growth, hit $185.7 billion in the first nine months, exceeding the $177.5 billion for all of last year.
China’s forex reserves, which overtook Japan’s for the world’s top spot in early 2006, have also been boosted by foreign direct investment.
In the first nine months of 2007, foreign direct investment rose 10.9 percent from the same period in 2006 to $47.2 billion, the commerce ministry said earlier Friday. In addition, the inflow of speculative funds banking on short-term investment gains, known as “hot money,“ is believed to have contributed to the reserves, although the exact figure is difficult to calculate.
However, hot money constitutes a “very small“ amount, the Shanghai Securities News reported recently, citing Wang Guogang, a finance expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the top government think-tank. Wang was quoted by the paper as saying China’s strict capital controls have played a key role in stemming an “otherwise unimaginable“ amount of capital inflow to the country.
Having accumulated this vast amount of money, Chinese policy-makers are faced with the challenge of finding good ways to invest it.
About 70 percent of foreign reserves is generally believed to be held in US dollar-denominated paper, principally US government bonds. This has proved a less-than-ideal solution, given not just the low yields on government debt, but also the weakening of the US currency.
To cope with this problem, the government late last month launched the China Investment Corp., charged with managing about $200 billion of the nation’s reserves. The company will try to maximize the proceeds via long-term investments “within a range of acceptable risks,“ according to earlier reports in the state media.

NEW DELHI, India, Oct. 13--India’s finance minister has said unprecedented foreign investment flows into the rapidly growing economy have pushed the rupee higher into an “uncomfortable“ zone. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said the country was having problems in handling the rush of funds, AFP reported.
“We must find ways to manage a competitive exchange rate without hurting investments,“ Chidambaram told a conference organized by the Hindustan Times newspaper late on Friday. The rupee is in an “uncomfortable zone,“ he said.
Lifted by a tide of overseas money into domestic shares following a cut in US interest rates last month, the currency strengthened beyond the psychologically key 40 rupees to the dollar barrier. “This is a new situation,“ Chidambaram said. “But we are not alarmed by it. We will gain mastery.“ The rupee finished the week Friday flat against the dollar at 39.3, a nine-and-a-half year high. Dealers say the central bank has been buying dollars to restrain the rupee’s rally and protect exports which have been slowing.
But analysts say there is relentless upward pressure on the rupee and expect it to gain further as foreign investors buy shares and pour money into plants and infrastructure projects to exploit the booming economy.
As of Friday’s finish, the benchmark Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index, or Sensex, had gained nearly 34 percent this year, led by record net overseas fund inflows of $16.54 billion.
Some analysts say the rupee could be at 38 to the dollar by mid-next year or even lower. The rupee has already risen by over 11 percent this year against the dollar, making it Asia’s best performing currency.
Chidambaram said as long as investors were getting good returns “I don’t believe they are waiting to take their money out.“

PARIS, Oct. 13--French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said an internal probe had shown her ministry to have been “beyond reproach“ in relation to an insider trading scandal at Airbus parent company EADS.
Lagarde on Thursday was presenting the findings of an inquiry to determine whether the government knew of problems at Airbus when a state-owned bank, the Caisse des depots et consignations (CDC), purchased EADS shares from the Lagardere group, AFP said.
Several top executives and corporate shareholders Lagardere and Germany’s DaimlerChrysler are suspected of illegally selling millions of euros in shares before serious production and delivery delays in the Airbus superjumbo A380 jet were announced.
“I can already draw the conclusion that my ministry carried out its mission in the most professional way, in a way as beyond reproach as can be expected from the services of the state,“ Lagarde said, an hour after receiving the report. “I am delighted about that,“ she added.
She said the state had no more knowledge than the public of the A380’s difficulties “until at least the end of May 2006,“ as she presented the report by general finance inspector Bernard Schneiter to a Senate finance committee.
The setbacks at Airbus were publicly disclosed in mid-June 2006, causing a plunge in the EADS share price.
France’s Socialist opposition on Monday called for a commission of inquiry on the government’s role in the scandal at the European Aeronautic Defense and Space (EADS) company.
The opposition has zeroed in on allegations that the former government allowed the CDC to purchase EADS shares sold in April 2006 by the Lagardere group--whose chief executive Arnaud Lagardere is a close friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Former finance minister Thierry Breton gave testimony before a Senate committee hearing last week, asserting that the “state was beyond reproach“ and that he was not notified of the deal with Lagardere.
Sarkozy has pledged to fully investigate whether the government had a hand in the insider trading scandal.

BERLIN, Oct. 13--IMF policymakers are set for tough talks next week on reforming the IMF’s mechanism to determine national contributions--or quotas--in the face of rising demands from emerging countries, a German official said Friday. “Expectations by certain emerging countries on the extent of reform have increased,“ junior economy minister Thomas Mirow told a press conference here, AFP wrote.
They have gone “beyond what has been discussed until now,“ he added without elaborating. “This is a new development.“
As a result, Mirow said, he did not expect firm results on the quota question at an annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, October 20 and 21.
Incoming IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has made reforming contributions by member states a priority of his mandate, with the intention of increasing representation by emerging countries.
The IMF’s financial resources stem mainly from quota subscriptions, which are assigned to each member according to its relative size in the world economy. A member’s quota also determines its voting power as well as its access to IMF financing.
In recent years, developing and emerging market countries have been pressing for quota reforms to give them a stronger voice in IMF policymaking.
Mirow said finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized countries--Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States--wanted to discuss spending reforms ahead of the IMF meeting as well. The ministers are due to gather in Washington on October 19. German currently holds the rotating G7 presidency.
Both forums would also examine “the situation and development of financial markets and the consequences on the global economy,“ he added.
Bank of Italy governor Mario Draghi, who is also president of the Financial Stability Forum, was to present FSF propositions on financial innovations and ways to make them more resistant to financial crises such as the meltdown of the US market for high-risk home loans.

MAPUTO, Mozambique, Oct. 13--Africa’s biggest ethanol production project, valued at $510 million (359 million euros) will be developed in Mozambique from next year, Agriculture Minister Erasmo Muhate said on Friday.
“Under the project, among other things, more than 30,000 hectares of sugar cane will be produced as well as a factory for the production of ethanol from the sugar cane,“ said the minister, who did not give details of the quantity of ethanol to be produced annually, AFP wrote.
“The project will be developed by the Central African Mining and Exploration Company (CAMEC)“, a mining group operating in Mozambique since 2003, with offices in South Africa, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Muhate said. Most of the ethanol would be exported to Europe and the exports are expected to generate up to $40 million annually, he added. Mozambique already has a factory producing ethanol, inaugurated in August with a capacity of 80,000 liters per day.
The new project has attracted criticisms from the local media, which said the government should have rather encouraged food production to feed the country’s 17 million population.