| Terminal Boredom Buying Costing UK Holidaymakers £250m+
Leftover FOREIGN cash wasted in airports. UK holidaymakers wasted over a quarter of a BILLION pounds in foreign airports this summer using up leftover currency, according to a study released today by Post Office® Travel Services. The research shows that over half (54 per cent) of holidaymakers are guilty of Terminal Boredom Buying where they fritter away leftover currency on non-essential purchases rather than changing it back into sterling. Nearly one in five (19 per cent) admitted to parting with over £25 in the airport on things they did not need.* .
Philippine peso to hit 37.2:1 against greenback in 2008
MANILA, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- Investment lender HSBC expect the Philippine peso to surge to as high as 37.2:1 against the U.S. dollar this year, due to strong foreign exchange inflows from overseas Filipinos and investments, reports said on Thursday. However, the strong local currency will accompany a slowdown in the country's economic expansion, local TV network GMA News reported, citing HSBC economist Frederic Neumann. The Philippines' gross domestic product will only grow 5.9 percent in 2008, after expanding more than 7 percent in the first three quarters of 2007, the economist said, adding that the average inflation for the year will be 4.1 percent. "We are quite bullish about foreign investments this year particularly in the services sector such as business process outsourcing and tourism development," Neumann said.
Turn up the Abba, as Alistair takes us back to the 1970s
Listening yesterday to Alistair Darling explaining why the government wanted three-year pay deals with public sector workers was like turning the clock back 30 years. For any child of the 1970s, there was only one response to the chancellor: put Abba Gold on the turntable, and play it loud. There are five similarities between the current state of the nation and those in the decade that ran between the breakup of the Beatles and the Moscow Olympics. First, a prolonged global boom was brought to a halt by a fourfold increase in oil prices between late 1973 and early 1974, with higher inflation and rising unemployment ushering in the era of stagflation. Since early 2003, global oil prices have again risen fourfold. Inflation is rising just as the global economy's second longest postwar boom has come to grief as a result of the collapse of the United States housing market and the credit crunch.
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