Japan econmin urges US to resolve fiscal standoff

TOKYO: Japanese Economics Minister Akira Amari on Friday urged US politicians to resolve the fiscal impasse with a sense of responsibility as the world's largest economy.
Amari told reporters that if the impasse is to persist, theUnited States may default on its debt, an outcome which is unthinkable even in developing countries.
US Republicans offered a plan to President Barack Obama on Thursday that would postpone a possible US default in a sign that the two sides may be moving to end the deadlock.
No deal emerged from a 90-minute meeting at the White House, but the two sides said they would continue to talk. It was the first sign of a thaw in a political squabbling that has weighed on financial markets and knocked hundreds of thousands of US federal employees out of work.

Economists clash on theory, but will still share the Nobel Prize

WASHINGTON: The economist Robert J Shiller in 2005 described the rapid rise of housing prices as a bubble and warned that prices could fall by 40 percent.
Five years later, with home prices well on the way to fulfilling Shiller's prediction, the economist Eugene F Fama said he still did not believe there had been a bubble.
"I don't even know what a bubble means," said Fama, the author of the theory that asset prices perfectly reflect all available information. "These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning."
The two men, leading proponents of opposing views about the rationality of financial markets - a dispute with important implications for investment strategy, financial regulation and economic policy - were joined in unlikely union Monday as winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. 
Fama's seminal theory of rational, efficient markets inspired the rise of index funds and contributed to the decline of financial regulation. Shiller, perhaps his most influential critic, carefully assembled evidence of irrational, inefficient behavior and gained a measure of fame by predicting the fall of stock prices in 2000 as well as the housing crash that began in 2006.

Barack Obama, Republicans aim to end budget crisis after meeting

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama and Republican leaders appeared ready to end a political crisis that has shuttered much of the US government and pushed the country dangerously close to default after meeting at the White House on Thursday.

No deal emerged from the 90-minute meeting, but talks continued into the night in an effort to re-open the government and extend the government's borrowing authority beyond an Oct. 17 deadline. One senior Republican said an agreement could come on Friday, though hurdles remain.

The plummeting standing of congressional Republicans in public opinion polls helped spur a move toward ending the standoff, Oklahoma Republican Representative James Lankford said on CNN Thursday night. The latest, an NBC-Wall Street Journal survey published on Thursday, showed the public blaming Republicans by a 22-point margin - 53 to 31 per cent.