Crude breaks through $60 mark
Singapore: The price of crude vaulted to a new high breaking the psychologically important $60 a barrel threshold.

After settling at $59.84 a barrel on Friday, July contract crude surged to $60.46 a barrel in Asian trading hours on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a jump of 62 cents from Friday's close.

Other petroleum products also followed crude's rise.
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China not to budge over currency reform
Beijing: China has vowed to resist pressure from the US and the European Union to revalue its currency, the renminbi. China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said cutting the link between the yuan, the underlying currency unit in the country, and the US dollar would cause economic turbulence and destabilise global financial markets.

Wen's refusal to give in to international demands for a revaluation of the yuan, which has been pegged at a rate of 8.3 to the dollar for about 10 years, will disappoint the US government and EU officials. They believe the yuan is undervalued against world currencies, which means Chinese exports are artificially cheap; as a result, Western manufacturers are unfairly disadvantaged.

The US Senate is considering introducing economic sanctions to force the Chinese government to take action, which may include imposing import duties on Chinese goods of up to 27.5 per cent.

However, Wen warned the Asia/Europe meeting of EU and Asian foreign ministers that he would not rush into a revaluation. "A great deal of preparation is still needed until we have favourable conditions," he said. "We must avoid economic turbulence and disturbances to the financial markets."

The Prime Minister's speech followed similar remarks from Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, who last week stated that "the time is not yet ripe" to revalue the yuan.

The US government is determined to continue its campaign for reform, as it attempts to reduce the country's $162bn (£89bn) trade deficit with China. The International Monetary Fund has also backed calls for a revaluation. Yesterday, Takatoshi Kato, the IMF's deputy managing director, said China's economy was strong enough to cope with a less competitively valued yuan.

Last week, though, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, rejected the American campaign for revaluation. Greenspan said a more highly valued yuan would not reduce the US trade deficit, because consumers would buy cheap goods from other Asian economies instead. The Fed chairman also told the US Senate's committee on finance he did not know of any "credible evidence" that revaluing the yuan would significantly increase US manufacturing activity or lead to the creation of jobs.
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