Radioactive cesium was found in milk powder made by a Meiji Holdings Co. unit in Japan, prompting a voluntary recall of 400,000 cans of the infant formula, Kyodo News said today.
Meiji shares tumbled the most in more than eight months after the report, which said the contamination may be the result of radiation leaked from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Products affected by the recall have the following expiry dates in 2012: Oct. 4, Oct. 21, Oct. 22. and Oct. 24, Kyodo reported.
Meiji slumped as much as 13 percent (2269) on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The shares traded down 9.6 percent at a 30-month low of 3,025 yen at 2:28 p.m. local time, set for the biggest one- day slide since March 15.
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Showing posts with label japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label japan. Show all posts
Monday, December 5, 2011
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Sounds like a lack of transparency, ethics, & controls are the root cause, in this exciting advenutre of the 1% eat their own!!!
MF Global Holdings Ltd. (MF) fired 15 employees from its Japan unit before filing for bankruptcy yesterday, said Kazuyuki Sugimoto, secretary general at the Federation of Foreign Bank Employees Union.
The analysts, traders and sales staff had their employment contracts terminated, Sugimoto said in a telephone interview in Tokyo today. Workers from the New York-based securities firm’s Japan unit joined the federation in September, he said.
“We are not able to comment on this,” Clara Goh, MF Global’s Singapore-based spokeswoman for Asia Pacific, wrote in an e-mailed reply to inquiries about the dismissals from Bloomberg News.
The Japanese unit, MF Global FXA Securities Ltd., has 53 employees, according to the Financial Services Agency. The FSA issued an order protecting the assets of the unit and instructed the firm to improve its business, it said in a statement today.
MF Global, the holding company for the broker-dealer run by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. co-chairman Jon Corzine, listed debt of $39.7 billion and assets of $41 billion in Chapter 11 papers filed yesterday to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
The impact of the company’s collapse on Japan’s financial system will be negligible, Financial Services Minister Shozaburo Jimi told reporters in Tokyo. MF Global FXA Securities has capital of 935 million yen ($12 million), the FSA statement said.
Of the 15 dismissed workers, 14 were based in Tokyo and one worked in Singapore, Sugimoto said.
The analysts, traders and sales staff had their employment contracts terminated, Sugimoto said in a telephone interview in Tokyo today. Workers from the New York-based securities firm’s Japan unit joined the federation in September, he said.
“We are not able to comment on this,” Clara Goh, MF Global’s Singapore-based spokeswoman for Asia Pacific, wrote in an e-mailed reply to inquiries about the dismissals from Bloomberg News.
The Japanese unit, MF Global FXA Securities Ltd., has 53 employees, according to the Financial Services Agency. The FSA issued an order protecting the assets of the unit and instructed the firm to improve its business, it said in a statement today.
MF Global, the holding company for the broker-dealer run by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. co-chairman Jon Corzine, listed debt of $39.7 billion and assets of $41 billion in Chapter 11 papers filed yesterday to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
The impact of the company’s collapse on Japan’s financial system will be negligible, Financial Services Minister Shozaburo Jimi told reporters in Tokyo. MF Global FXA Securities has capital of 935 million yen ($12 million), the FSA statement said.
Of the 15 dismissed workers, 14 were based in Tokyo and one worked in Singapore, Sugimoto said.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
More Yen to the Dollar to follow shortly....
Japan intervened to weaken the yen after the currency hit a record high against the dollar on Monday, saying it acted to counter speculative moves that did not reflect the health of the Japanese economy.
The dollar spiked after the intervention as much as 4 percent past 79 yen from around 75.65 yen. The dollar touched a record low of 75.31 yen earlier on Monday.
Finance Minister Jun Azumi said Tokyo stepped into the market for the second time in less than three months on its own at 10:25 a.m. local time (0125 GMT) and would continue to intervene until it was satisfied with the results.
"I have repeatedly said that we would take decisive steps against speculative moves in the market," Azumi told an ad-hoc news conference.
Azumi would not comment on the size of the intervention, but one trader said the authorities were intervening "quite persistently."
"My sense is that they might not quit very easily," a trader said. The trader added, however, that dollar/yen may start to become heavy at levels above 79 yen.
Tokyo's second foray into currency markets since its record 4.5 trillion yen selling intervention on August 4, follows weeks of warnings by government and central bank officials that their patience with the currency's strength was wearing thin.
Even though the yen's exchange rate when measured against a trade-weighted basket of currencies and adjusted for inflation is not far from its 30-year average, it has been trading at much stronger levels against the dollar than one assumed by Japanese exporters in their earnings projections.
Last Thursday, acting in part out of concern that the yen's impact on corporate profits could derail Japan's recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami, the Bank of Japan eased its monetary policy by boosting government bond purchases.
But the easing failed to take the pressure off the yen, which continued to climb against the U.S. dollar -- underpinned by investors seeking relative safety in the currency from the European debt crisis.
The dollar spiked after the intervention as much as 4 percent past 79 yen from around 75.65 yen. The dollar touched a record low of 75.31 yen earlier on Monday.
Finance Minister Jun Azumi said Tokyo stepped into the market for the second time in less than three months on its own at 10:25 a.m. local time (0125 GMT) and would continue to intervene until it was satisfied with the results.
"I have repeatedly said that we would take decisive steps against speculative moves in the market," Azumi told an ad-hoc news conference.
Azumi would not comment on the size of the intervention, but one trader said the authorities were intervening "quite persistently."
"My sense is that they might not quit very easily," a trader said. The trader added, however, that dollar/yen may start to become heavy at levels above 79 yen.
Tokyo's second foray into currency markets since its record 4.5 trillion yen selling intervention on August 4, follows weeks of warnings by government and central bank officials that their patience with the currency's strength was wearing thin.
Even though the yen's exchange rate when measured against a trade-weighted basket of currencies and adjusted for inflation is not far from its 30-year average, it has been trading at much stronger levels against the dollar than one assumed by Japanese exporters in their earnings projections.
Last Thursday, acting in part out of concern that the yen's impact on corporate profits could derail Japan's recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami, the Bank of Japan eased its monetary policy by boosting government bond purchases.
But the easing failed to take the pressure off the yen, which continued to climb against the U.S. dollar -- underpinned by investors seeking relative safety in the currency from the European debt crisis.
Monday, September 26, 2011
See what one "Oh Shit!" costs in terms of a nuclear mishap.
Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets.
Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more.
“Older folks want to return, but the young worry about radiation,” said Harada, whose family ran the farm for 40 years. “I want to farm, but will we be able to sell anything?”
What’s emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima’s $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture’s mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished.
The March earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear crisis and left almost 20,000 people dead or missing may cost 17 trillion ($223 billion), hindering the recovery of the world’s third-largest economy from two decades of stagnation.
Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more.
“Older folks want to return, but the young worry about radiation,” said Harada, whose family ran the farm for 40 years. “I want to farm, but will we be able to sell anything?”
What’s emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima’s $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture’s mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished.
The March earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear crisis and left almost 20,000 people dead or missing may cost 17 trillion ($223 billion), hindering the recovery of the world’s third-largest economy from two decades of stagnation.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Nuclear energy is not a sovereign decision; it’s a global choice
As some nations push on with nuclear programs and others can’t retire their existing plants fast enough. It is clear, much like climate change, the actions of one nation effect the viability of the others on this blue-ish brown (smog) planet.
California scientists witnessed a spike in radioactive airborne material in March following the meltdown of Japan’s wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant, a study showed.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, observed the highest levels ever detected of radioactive sulfur in the atmosphere, 15 days after Fukushima’s operators cooled the damaged reactors by pumping in seawater, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The 40-year-old Fukushima plant withstood the country’s worst earthquake on record, only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter (23-foot) tsunami that followed. Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure. A series of explosions ensued, blowing out concrete walls around some reactors.
The amount of radioactive material that escaped from the reactor’s core and found a kilometer above Fukushima was 365 times higher than normal, researchers calculated in the study. About 0.7 percent of the material made its way 5,800 miles across the Pacific Ocean to California, the study said. Researchers made their measurements in La Jolla, California.
California scientists witnessed a spike in radioactive airborne material in March following the meltdown of Japan’s wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant, a study showed.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, observed the highest levels ever detected of radioactive sulfur in the atmosphere, 15 days after Fukushima’s operators cooled the damaged reactors by pumping in seawater, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The 40-year-old Fukushima plant withstood the country’s worst earthquake on record, only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter (23-foot) tsunami that followed. Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure. A series of explosions ensued, blowing out concrete walls around some reactors.
The amount of radioactive material that escaped from the reactor’s core and found a kilometer above Fukushima was 365 times higher than normal, researchers calculated in the study. About 0.7 percent of the material made its way 5,800 miles across the Pacific Ocean to California, the study said. Researchers made their measurements in La Jolla, California.
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