Bankers focus on Asian and African growth

The latest Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) Barometer reveals that 43 per cent of companies questioned have seen an increase in their order books over the past six months (+4% on the previous survey), with a massive 62 per cent expecting sales turnover to grow between now and June 2013. The predicted expansion is backed up by the number of firms expecting to take on staff and those investing in new premises and machinery.

Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service are cutting corporate debt ratings at the fastest pace since 2009 as a global economic slowdown and record borrowing erode credit quality.

Coal will nearly overtake oil as the dominant energy source by 2017, and only a drop in world gas prices could curb the use of the dirtier fossil fuel in the absence of high carbon prices, the International Energy Agency said. The IEA, the energy agency for developed countries, said earlier this year that without a major shift away from coal, average global temperatures could rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, leading to devastating climate change.

Trefis submits: Credit Suisse’s (NYSE:CS) wealth management division accounts for about 46% of the $49.17 Trefis price estimate for Credit Suisse’s stock, which is slightly ahead of the current market price.

Emerging Money submits: By Tim Seymour Over the last month, everyone with a global call on the markets has been predicting that developed markets will continue to overshadow the emerging world and flows to Western Europe, Japan and North America will continue. The clear but overhyped argument was that the developed world is actually growing at a faster-than-expected rate without generating appreciable inflation.

ETF Database submits: As investors have grown more comfortable allocating more significant portions of portfolios to emerging markets, the number of ETFs offering exposure to these regions of the world has surged in recent years. Exchange-traded products now exist offering investors exposure to a variety of markets that were once hard-to-access for all but the largest and most sophisticated investors.

Michael Pettis submits: The seemingly imminent and inexorable rise of the renminbi as a major, even dominant, reserve and trading currency, has been almost as widely heralded as the equivalent rise of the Japanese yen just twenty years ago. Even my normally skeptical friend Nouriel Roubini seems to think so.

Political pressure seems to be mounting for yuan appreciation. [0] Figure 1 depicts the stability in the USD/CNY nominal exchange rate over the past year.