The Daily Business Digest

Taiwan is a very small country which got separated from China few decades back, and it is continuously under threat from China. China does not want any external interference in the issue, but it is the most juicy issue for US to keep haunting China easily.
So the US administration has now decided to sell six billion dollars worth of arms and high technology weapons to Taiwan. US says that the deal has been pending for the last several years and it has kept China informed on the negotiations.
Now China has hit back saying that further relationship between many US military companies and Chinese companies will be hit badly. It has gone ahead and notified banning of many US companies in future deals with China.

The Sri Lankan Presidential elections were fought this week in a closely contested environment. While the incumbent President Rajapakse was expected to win with a narrow margin, his competitor General Ponseka was also seen making strong advances.
But the results have been announced today, which has indicated a sweeping victory for Rajapakse. So he is expected to remain the Sri Lankan President for another five years. He has been successful in eliminating the three decade strong Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam last year. And that has enabled him to bring peace to the trouble torn Island nation after three decades.
He is expected to now focus on the development of the nation in a big way through better relationship with China. That could indeed be a big thorn in the country’s relationship with the neighboring India.

The year 2009 dawned well for Obama with him becoming the President of United States of America. He started with a massive approval rate for his policies that were set to be implemented immediately. With eight months of power consumed by Obama, and with over one trillion dollars of taxpayers money spent without any tangible results.
The unemployment rate has only reached a 26 year high of 9.7% , and also there are no signs of real recovery in the housing and automobile sector. With the unemployment rate at record high levels, it is only obvious that the consumer spending will be low in the coming year. That spells doom for every sector in US, be it banking or housing or retail or engineering or automobile or electronics.
And Obama is also being troubled badly by the troubling countries namely Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Syria. All these countries are posing bigger threats than never before with few of them having access to nuclear technology.
And consumer prices of food articles are only spiking up due to reduced production across the key agricultural countries like Brazil , India and Argentina. All these are expected to push down Obama rating drastically by the beginning of 2010.
A recent survey in US conducted last month I.e, six months after being in power, has already indicated a sharp drop in Obama popularity.

The Barack Obama administration is doing exactly what the US has been doing for the last several years. It has tripled the financial aid for Pakistan in spite of knowing that Pakistan is using part of it for building weapons against India.
Also Obama administration has once again started asking India to sign Non-Proliferation Treaty, in spite of knowing India’s opposition to it for years together. Obama administration is asking for this only to make India reduce the pressure on Pakistan issue.
Over the coming months, there could be more trouble for India, because Obama administration would like to create more global confusion by focusing on non-issues like NPT, Iran , North Korea etc., because it is slowly losing control over the US economy.
The US just needs one big trigger now to again reach all time lows because it is suffering from 9.7% unemployment and a very weak housing market. And the US government is already running on 1.3 trillion dollars deficit which it cannot grow further.

North Korea went out of the multi-nation talks few weeks back and since then it has been doing all provocative actions. First it went ahead with long range missile test that upset South Korea and Japan, and followed it up with under ground nuclear tests.
It also warned of military retaliation against South Korea if any of its ship were intercepted in international waters by any country. The UN council has passed a strong resolution against North Korea to force it into talks. So far it has not yielded any result.
The Obama administration is likely to initiate fresh steps to bring back North Korea to the negotiation table.

The second most populous country in the world, India, went for polls last month. The exit polls indicated that the country is heading for a hung parliament and was all set for a uncertain period. The various exit polls were unanimous on this, and they differed only on the variance margin.
But the results announced few days back were totally shocking even for the winner I.e, the Congress party and its allies. The Congress party ended up gobbling up 200 seats on its own, and including its electoral allies it was way ahead of the 272 seats.
This has come as a big relief for millions of Indians and also for the scores of Foreign investors who have put their money into Indian stock market. The previous government could not take up the reforms in a big way only because it was a minority government. It depended on the left parties for passing every bill in parliament. The left parties are no where in the scene post results. This is expected to help the ruling party to push all the reforms in the next five years.
The stock markets were instantly reacting to the unexpected results, by surging up by over 20% in the first three trading sessions post the results.