Euro Trades Near Lowest Since 2006 on Concern Growth to Slow

The euro held near its lowest level against the dollar since April 2006 even as European finance ministers sought to assuage concern that spending cuts to combat the region’s debt crisis will derail growth.
The single currency weakened the most against the South Korean won and the South African rand before a German report forecast to show deteriorating confidence among analysts and investors in Europe’s largest economy. Australia’s dollar held near a three-month low after central bank minutes of its May 4 meeting damped expectations for continued interest-rate increases as policy makers warned about effects from Europe’s fiscal crisis.
“Sentiment towards the euro remains very weak for good reasons,” said Paul Robson, a senior foreign-exchange strategist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “That’s going to send it below $1.20 in the month ahead.”
The euro was little changed at $1.2404 as of 8:27 a.m. in London, from $1.2395 in New York yesterday, when it fell as much as 1 percent to $1.2235, the lowest since April 18, 2006. It climbed to 115.19 yen from 114.77 yen yesterday, when it reached the least since May 6. The dollar climbed to 92.87 yen from 92.59.
Australia’s currency was little changed at 87.77 U.S. cents after touching 86.86 cents yesterday, the least since Feb. 9. The euro dropped 0.6 percent to 1,421.197 won and the same percentage to 9.3102 rand.
Spending Cuts
Euro area policy makers last week unveiled an unprecedented loan package worth nearly $1 trillion and a program of bond purchases to forestall defaults by countries including Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Spain unveiled on May 14 the biggest cuts in at least 30 years and Portugal followed a day later, pledging to slash wages and raise taxes. Italian officials said May 16 it may make an extraordinary reduction in spending and France is slated to submit spending plans this week.
Only high-deficit countries including Spain and Portugal will be ordered to make additional deficit cuts, while budget policies will remain untouched in better-off nations such as Germany and Finland, European finance ministers said after a meeting in Brussels.
“Not everyone will accelerate consolidation in a very uniform way,” European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told reporters early today in Brussels. “That would lead to a very restrictive fiscal stance for the euro area as a whole, which would risk depressing economic growth.”
Relative Strength Index
The euro dropped 8.8 percent this year against its developed world counterparts, according to Bloomberg Correlation Weighted Indexes. The common currency rebounded from a four-year low yesterday after the European Central Bank explained how it would absorb excess liquidity from bond purchases.
The euro’s 14-day relative-strength index, a measure of how rapidly prices rise or fall, was at 24.01 today. Readings below 30 are a signal that an asset’s value has dropped too fast and is poised to rebound.
The euro also came under pressure after the U.S. Senate voted for a measure that would require the Treasury Department to certify that International Monetary Fund loans to highly indebted countries get repaid. The IMF is taking part in the euro-zone bailout.
The Australian dollar was near its three-month low on speculation the Reserve Bank of Australia will slow down the pace of interest rate increases as Europe’s debt crisis threatens to stall the global economic recovery.
‘Signaling Slowdown’
“Increases in interest rates to date had been timely” with signs that the moves were “beginning to affect behavior” of consumers and home buyers, RBA officials said in minutes released today in Sydney of their May 4 meeting.
“The RBA is signaling a slowdown in the pace of rate hikes ahead, giving way to the kiwi for which interest rate expectations are gradually rising,” said Akira Maekawa, a senior economist at online currency trader Global Futures & Forex Ltd. in Tokyo.
Losses in the euro may be tempered as European policy makers signaled they will provide enough funds for Greece to pay its debt as scheduled.
Greece will receive 14.5 billion euros ($17.9 billion) in the first installment of emergency European Union loans today, a Greek Finance Ministry official, who declined to be identified, said yesterday in Athens. In Brussels, EU spokesman Amadeu Altafaj confirmed the bloc will send the first loan tranche today.
The funds will arrive one day before 8.5 billion euros of bonds come due and will cover the country’s financing needs for May and June, the Greek official said.A troupe of little vagrants of the world
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5-Year-Old YouTube Tops Networks’ Primetime With 2 Billion Views

Epicenter Mind Our Tech Business
5-Year-Old YouTube Tops Networks’ Primetime With 2 Billion Views
America’s Funniest Home Videos may have pioneered the YouTube concept, but as the site reaches the five-year mark, its audience size is no laughing matter. YouTube’s viewership now exceeds that of all three networks combined during their “primetime” evening time slot, with more than 2 billion views per day, Google announced Sunday.
Granted, YouTube’s numbers come from worldwide views, while ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast their primetime channels within the United States. But this is a significant milestone nonetheless, and hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video-delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.
Google also trumpeted some other key stats: People upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute; the average user spends only 15 minutes a day on the site, which YouTube would like to increase in part by renting full-length films; and YouTube has broadcast live sports to more than 200 countries.
To celebrate its fifth birthday, YouTube asks the site’s users to upload videos of how the site has affected their lives, some of which will appear on a specially curated channel. In addition, celebrities including Conan O’Brien — whose best next career move might be to become official curator of YouTube — marked the occasion by posting a playlist consisting of their favorite videos (view his above).
Should the networks really be worried about being overtaken by YouTube? Yes and no. They own their content, YouTube has professed a wish to lengthen viewing times. Licensing currently-airing full-length network television shows (in addition to the older shows they currently license) would be a great way to do that. And the networks are in a more favorable negotiating position than the record labels were when they made similar deals, due to Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com already attracting large audiences for that content.
Perhaps a more serious threat to the networks is that YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and that our viewing habits on the computer will soon migrate to the living room.
Plenty of set-top boxes already play high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos on a television set. When Google unveils its next-generation set-top box, possibly as soon as Wednesday’s I/O Conference, in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony, YouTube will assume an even greater presence on the television. Even if the networks continue to hold back their full episodes of new shows from on YouTube, users could come to prefer a higher percentage of direct-to-internet content on their televisions.
As paidContent founder and editor Rafat Ali tweeted Monday morning, Conan O’Brien seems “a lot funnier on the internets” than he did on network television, and O’Brien recently joked with a roomful of Google employees about a world without television networks. Who knows, five years from now, O’Brien could be hosting his own show on YouTube, rather than fretting about his terminated NBC contract.
“I don’t know what television’s going to be five years from now. There’s a lot of people that think you’re just going to experience it all through your server, and people don’t even know how the business is going to change,” said O’Brien, who should know, as a longtime television host and writer-producer of the Simpsons.
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