Treasury Will Not Mint $1 Trillion Coin to Raise Debt Ceiling

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Saturday that it will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to head off an imminent battle with Congress over raising the government’s borrowing limit.

“Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” Anthony Coley, a Treasury spokesman, said in a written statement.

The Obama administration has indicated that the only way for the country to avoid a cash-management crisis as soon as next month is for Congress to raise the “debt ceiling,” which is the statutory limit on government borrowing. The cap is $16.4 trillion.

“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”

In recent weeks, some Republicans have indicated that they would not agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agreed to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.

The White House has said it would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for Congressional authority to borrow more, and it has insisted that Congress raise the ceiling as a matter of course, to cover expenses already authorized by Congress. In broader fiscal negotiations, it has said it would not agree to spending cuts without commensurate tax increases.

The idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin drew wide if puzzling attention recently after some bloggers and economic commentators had suggested it as an alternative to involving Congress.

By virtue of an obscure law meant to apply to commemorative coins, the Treasury secretary could order the production of a high-denomination platinum coin and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, where it would count as a government asset and give the country more breathing room under its debt ceiling. Once Congress raised the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could then order the coin destroyed.

Mr. Carney, the press secretary, fielded questions about the theoretical tactic at a news conference last week. But the idea is now formally off the table.

The White House has also rejected the idea that it could mount a challenge to the debt ceiling itself, on the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that the “validity of the public debt” of the United States “shall not be questioned.”

The Washington Post earlier published a report that the Obama administration had rejected the platinum-coin idea.

Read More..

S.F. mourns a twin with a passion for fashion

SAN FRANCISCO — They were known simply as the San Francisco Twins.

At 5-foot-1 and about 100 pounds apiece, the fashion enthusiasts were an integral part of the city fabric for four decades. With matching furs, hats and high-end purses, they completed each other's sentences, posed for countless tourist snapshots and modeled for the likes of Reebok, Joe Boxer and IBM.

Now one is gone.

Vivian Brown, 85, who had Alzheimer's, died in her sleep Wednesday, leaving behind Marian, who was eight minutes younger. The illness, and news of the twins' financial distress, brought an outpouring of support from city residents in recent months.

Donations managed by Jewish Family and Children Services helped Vivian move into an elegant assisted living facility in Lower Pacific Heights and provided for a car service so Marian could visit "as much as she wanted to," Development Director Barbara Farber said. "The community really responded.…It's been a beautiful thing."

At a benefit concert for the twins in August, the Go-Go's Jane Wiedlin and other musicians honored Marian. Cash flowed in to cover her meals at Uncle Vito's Pizza on Nob Hill, long one of the ladies' regular haunts.

On Friday, fans offered collective condolences as they swallowed some bitter medicine: The sightings that brought joy to many — of the twins in leopard-print cowboy hats parading up and down Powell Street and window shopping at Union Square — are forever a thing of the past.

In saying goodbye to Vivian, the city has ushered out an era of style.

"All of that has gone, and that's true of all cities," said Ann Moller Caen, the widow of Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, who wrote often about the twins. "They've lost the elegant few."

Mayor Ed Lee echoed residents' grief in online postings throughout the day, saying that "San Francisco is heartbroken" over Vivian's passing and was "fortunate to have called her a true friend."

The twins, who were born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and held degrees in business administration, moved to San Francisco in 1973, prompted by Vivian's chronic bronchial condition. Once on the West Coast, Vivian became a legal secretary and Marian worked at a bank.

But fashion was their passion, and they cut a striking double image.

There were the fitted white suit jackets with pleated skirts, veiled hats and white fur coats; the red wool Ellen Tracy suits with black felt hats and black gloves.

"When you first came to the city and saw them, you might think it was a little joke. But it really wasn't," Caen said Friday. "They were very warm and very pleasant to everyone, and they just loved Herb. And he loved them."

Evelyn Adler recalled that her father, who sold shoes at the Emporium on San Francisco's Market Street in the 1970s, had regularly waited on "the girls," as he called them.

"They were always at the very height of sometimes ridiculous fashion," said Adler, 82. Her father, she said, had talked of how years of wearing pointy shoes left the twins with overlapping toes. (They later embraced lower heels that were "much more suited to their feet," Adler said.)

As a volunteer for Jewish Family Services, Adler recently shopped for a new wardrobe for Vivian — and was taken aback by the sight of the twins in separate outfits. About a quarter-century ago, the twins admitted to an interviewer that after a six-month attempt to dress differently in their 20s, they had abandoned the project forever. Even their lingerie matched.

They had their regular haunts, which Marian now frequents solo.

David Dubiner, owner of Uncle Vito's Pizza, said the sisters began coming in nearly two decades ago. They always sat at the table by the window, chatting with tourists for so long that their food had to be reheated.

Vivian often did more talking, Dubiner said, but Marian now holds court for two.

On Thursday evening, Marian arrived alone at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Union Square to "have a glass of champagne and toast her sister goodbye," said Tom Sweeney, chief doorman at the hotel who for the last 37 years watched the twins descend the four blocks from their Nob Hill apartment.

"They're quite the personalities of San Francisco," Sweeney said. "We'll definitely miss Vivian."

lee.romney@latimes.com

Read More..

Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: The Star Factory

This is a near-infrared, colour-coded composite image of a sky field in the south-western part of the galactic star-forming region Messier 17. In this image, young and heavily obscured stars are recognized by their red colour. Bluer objects are either foreground stars or well-developed massive stars whose intense light ionizes the hydrogen in this region. The diffuse light that is visible nearly everywhere in the photo is due to emission from hydrogen atoms that have (re-)combined from protons and electrons. The dark areas are due to obscuration of the light from background objects by large amounts of dust — this effect also causes many of those stars to appear quite red. A cluster of young stars in the upper-left part of the photo, so deeply embedded in the nebula that it is invisible in optical light, is well visible in this infrared image. Technical information : The exposures were made through three filtres, J (at wavelength 1.25 µm; exposure time 5 min; here rendered as blue), H (1.65 µm; 5 min; green) and Ks (2.2 µm; 5 min; red); an additional 15 min was spent on separate sky frames. The seeing was 0.5 - 0.6 arcsec. The objects in the uppermost left corner area appear somewhat elongated because of a colour-dependent aberration introduced at the edge by the large-field optics. The sky field shown measures approx. 5 x 5 arcmin 2 (corresponding to about 3% of the full moon). North is up and East is left.

Image: ESO [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

Read More..

Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.

“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”

Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”

The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”

“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”

Read More..

Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales

The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.

Read More..

Restored funding for prescription drug-monitoring program urged

California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris on Thursday called on Gov. Jerry Brown to restore funding to a prescription drug-monitoring program that health experts say is key to combating drug abuse and overdose deaths in the state.

Harris' appeal to restore funding to CURES, as it is known, follows an article in The Times last month that reported that the system, once heralded as an invaluable tool, had been severely undermined by budget cuts and was not being used to its full potential.

The CURES database contains detailed information on prescription narcotics, including the names of patients, the doctors prescribing the drugs and the pharmacies that dispense them. The system was designed to help physicians detect "doctor-shopping" patients who dupe multiple physicians into prescribing drugs such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax.

Harris' request followed Brown's unveiling of a proposed $97.7-billion budget, which projects a surplus — a feat that has been accomplished only one time in the last decade. With California's fiscal condition improving, Harris said it was up to the state to make sure the money was "spent wisely."

"This includes smart investments that benefit Californians, such as restoring funding for the state's prescription drug-monitoring program," she said in a statement.

Brown's office had no comment.

The governor's budget does increase Harris' Department of Justice general fund allocation by 4.5% to $174.3 million, but it does not earmark money for CURES. Harris could seek legislative authority to spend some of her budget on the program.

"We are going to have a discussion on the funding and where the money will come from," said Lynda Gledhill, a spokeswoman for Harris.

CURES is the nation's oldest and largest prescription drug-monitoring program and once served as a model for other states. Today, it has fallen behind similar programs elsewhere. CURES data could be used to monitor physicians whose prescribing puts patients at risk. But it is not.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommends that states use such data to keep tabs on doctors, and at least half a dozen states do so.

As part of spending cuts aimed at maintaining the state's solvency amid a deep recession, Brown gutted the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which ran CURES, in 2011, shortly after Harris succeeded him as attorney general. Harris kept the program alive with about $400,000 in revenue from the Medical Board of California and other licensing boards. But it is down to one employee and has no enforcement capacity.

State officials have estimated it would cost about $2.8 million to make CURES more accessible and easier to use, and $1.6 million more per year to keep it running. However, officials say the program — with little or no additional financial resources — could now be used to identify potentially rogue doctors.

Bob Pack, an Internet entrepreneur, has advocated using CURES more vigorously to track reckless physicians and pharmacies as well as doctor-shopping patients. He became active on the issue after a driver high on painkillers and alcohol struck and killed his two young children in the Bay Area suburb of Danville in 2003.

Pack, who helped design an online portal to give physicians and pharmacists immediate access to CURES, said he was happy to see Harris ask Brown to restore funds for the program.

"But that's only a request," he said. "No one knows if that's really going to happen. Meanwhile, doctors are continuing to over-prescribe and thousands of Californians are dying from prescription drug overdoses. I hope this … has some bite to it."

An aide to Harris said restoring the CURES program is a high priority.

"She's committed to fixing the database and making it as strong as possible," said Travis LeBlanc, special assistant attorney general. "When we have limited resources and in a budget crunch, we need to focus our resources and use it in smart, efficient ways, and [CURES] is one of those," he said.

lisa.girion@latimes.com

scott.glover@latimes.com

Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts contributed to this report.

Read More..

Canadian Tax Collectors Solve Mystery of Open Source Government

When you think of hotbeds of open source innovation, Canada’s Treasury Board typically doesn’t make the cut. But over the past three years, coders at this slightly obscure Canadian tax-collecting agency have produced something that’s pretty rare in government: a hit open source project.

We’re not talking about the next Linux here, but this summer, the Treasury Board of Canada hosted a CodeFest to invite hackers — mostly government staffers — to hack its Web Experience Toolkit, or WET — a set of open-source tools that the Treasury Board uses for building websites.

One hundred and fifty people came. Many of them were young developers, excitedly swapping code and sharing ideas across tables. To Lucia Harper, a communications consultant at the event who has worked for the Canadian government, it wasn’t your federal coder snoozefest. It looked like the kind of hackathon that you’d see at private companies. There “were pods of people gathered in groups all sporting laptops; giant screens on the walls with Twitter feeds, code demonstrations, style guides and the like,” she wrote in a blog post about the event. “There was a hubbub people. There was a buzz of anticipation and solutions.”

2012 was the year that the U.S. government put the full court press on software developers. As we reported earlier this week, the federal CIO Steven VanRoekel has a vision of a more hackable, more accessible government where code-sharing is far more common — and far more useful.

And this vision is starting to pay off. Over the past few years, government use of the social-coding website, GitHub, has skyrocketed. Today, there are more than 350 government projects hosted there. But the sad truth is that most of this code hasn’t been able to attract a wide group of developers, outside of the folks who were paid to write the original code. That kind of crossover success is the hallmark of a really successful open source effort.

And that’s what’s starting to happen with WET. It already has contributors from 34 federal agencies, but now that’s starting to branch out. “We’ve had contributions from business and even academia,” says Paul Jackson, a web project officer with the Treasury Board. There’s a contributor in Spain, and another who works as a contractor for the City of Ottawa. There are close to 200 contributors in all, but the real number of people who have now participated in the project is surely much larger as many of those official contributors are simply passing along code that others on their team have developed.

With about 30 private sector participants, the project is getting contributions that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

That means that, for example, the Treasury Board gets the benefits of someone else’s user interface testing. “We’re still evolving with learning how to do user experience and improving the useability of our website,” Jackson says. “But there are a lot of firms out there that are dedicated to that very purpose. And if they can share their testing results and get involved and help us with improving our designs, it can make the product better as a whole.”

Down in New York State, Luke Charde says he’s using the success of WET to try to sell his colleagues on the idea of doing more open source development. “That’s my vision for what I want to do across different agencies in New York,” says Charde, a user-interface design lead with New York’s Office of IT Services. As he sees things, WET is a runaway success. Among GitHub’s government pages, at least, it’s “one of the first examples of massive collaboration happening and savings,” he says.

Read More..

UK’s Savile abused hundreds over six decades: report

LONDON (Reuters) – The late British TV presenter Jimmy Savile physically abused hundreds of people over six decades, according to a police-led report on Friday which said he carried out attacks at the BBC and at hospitals where he did voluntary work.

Of his victims, 73 percent were under 18 and 82 percent were female. The oldest was 47 and the youngest just 8.

“Savile’s offending footprint was vast, predatory and opportunistic,” Commander Peter Spindler told reporters.

Savile, one of the BBC’s biggest stars of the 1970s and 80s received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth for charity work. He died in 2011, aged 84, a year before allegations about his abusive behavior emerged in a TV documentary.

Friday’s report said he had committed 214 criminal offences including 34 rapes or serious sexual assaults across the country.

His offending first occurred in 1955 in the northern English city of Manchester and the last attack was in 2009, the report said. He abused people at the BBC from 1965 including in 2006 at the last recording of popular weekly show Top of the Pops.

He also targeted people at hospitals over 30 years from 1965, including at the renowned Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London.

“It is now clear that Savile was hiding in plain sight and using his celebrity status and fund-raising activity to gain uncontrolled access to vulnerable people across six decades,” the report said.

In all, 600 people had come forward to police with information of which 450 related to Savile.

The report, issued jointly by London police and the NSPCC children’s charity, said it was likely there would be more victims who did not feel able to come forward.

Friday’s report is one of 14 launched since the allegations about Savile emerged, including four at the BBC.

The revelations about Savile plunged the BBC into weeks of turmoil and led to resignation of the publicly funded broadcaster’s director general just 54 days into his job.

OTHER STARS QUESTIONED

Detectives have also been looking into allegations against Savile acting with others and into related sex crimes which had no direct link to Savile.

They have since questioned 10 men, including Jim Davidson, a comedian who hosted prime time shows on the BBC in the 1990s, former BBC radio DJ Dave Lee Travis, and Max Clifford, Britain’s most high-profile celebrity publicist.

They all deny any wrongdoing.

A one-time professional wrestler, Savile became famous as a pioneering DJ in the 1960s before becoming a regular fixture on TV hosting prime-time pop and children’s shows until the 1990s.

He also ran about 200 marathons for charity, raising tens of millions of pounds for hospitals, leading some to give him keys to rooms where victims now allege they were abused.

While many colleagues and viewers thought the cigar-chomping Savile was weird, with his long blonde hair, penchant for garish outfits and flashy jewellery, he was considered a “national treasure”, honored not just by the queen but also by the late Pope John Paul II who made him a papal knight in 1990.

Despite rumors and suspicions, his sex crimes only came to light when rival broadcaster ITV aired allegations against him.

That prompted allegations the BBC had covered up allegations of sex abuse after it was revealed it had dropped its own expose shortly after Savile’s death and had run tribute shows about him instead.

A lengthy report last month cleared of the BBC of any cover-up but said it had missed numerous warnings and proved incapable of dealing with the scandal when it finally broke.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Stephen Addison)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: UK’s Savile abused hundreds over six decades: report
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/uks-savile-abused-hundreds-over-six-decades-report/
Link To Post : UK’s Savile abused hundreds over six decades: report
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Parental Consent Rule May Proceed for a Circumcision Ritual, a Judge Says

New York City health officials may proceed temporarily with a plan to require parental consent before an infant may undergo a particular Jewish circumcision ritual, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

City officials say 12 cases of herpes simplex virus have likely resulted from the procedure, known as metzitzah b’peh, since 2000, including one Brooklyn case reported this week. Two infants died, and two suffered permanent brain damage. Most Jews no longer practice metzitzah b’peh, in which the circumciser uses his mouth to suck blood from the wound, but it remains common among some ultra-Orthodox communities.

Citing the risk of infection, health officials in September introduced a regulation that would require parents to provide written consent stating that they were aware of the health risks.

But the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, Agudath Israel of America, and the International Bris Association sued in October to stop the rule from taking effect, calling it an infringement of their constitutional rights. They also denied the procedure posed a risk and asked a federal court to put the rule on hold while the litigation proceeded.

In denying the request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the United States District Court for the Southern District wrote that the risks were clear.

“In light of the quality of the evidence presented in support of the regulation, we conclude that a continued injunction against enforcement of the regulation would not serve the public interest,” she wrote.

City lawyers said they were gratified by the ruling, but Andrew Moesel, a spokesman for the plaintiffs, said the groups would appeal. “We continue to believe that this case is a wrongful and unnecessary intrusion into the rights of freedom of religion and speech,” he said.

Read More..

Japan Approves $116 Billion for Urgent Economic Stimulus

TOKYO — The Japanese government approved emergency stimulus spending of ¥10.3 trillion Friday, part of an aggressive push by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to kick-start growth in a long-moribund economy.

Mr. Abe also reiterated his desire for the Japanese central bank to make a firmer commitment to stopping deflation by pumping more money into the economy, which the prime minister has said is crucial to getting businesses to invest and consumers to spend.

“We will put an end to this shrinking and aim to build a stronger economy where earnings and incomes can grow,” Mr. Abe said. “For that, the government must first take the initiative to create demand and boost the entire economy.”

Under the plan, the Japanese government will spend $116 billion on public works and disaster mitigation projects, subsidies for companies that invest in new technology and financial aid to small businesses.

Through these measures, the government will seek to raise real economic growth 2 percentage points and add 600,000 jobs to the economy, Mr. Abe said. The package announced Friday amounts to one of the largest spending plans in Japanese history, he said.

By simply talking about stimulus measures, Mr. Abe, who took office late last month, has already driven down the value of the yen, much to the relief of Japanese exporters, whose competitiveness benefits from a weaker currency. In response, Tokyo stocks have rallied.

But the government’s promises to spend its way out of economic stagnation also raise concerns about public debt, which has already mushroomed to twice the size of the Japanese economy and is the largest in the industrialized world.

At the root of Japan’s debt problems was a similar attempt in the 1990s by Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party to stimulate economic growth through government spending on extensive public works projects across the country. The effort did little to bring growth to the wider economy.

On Friday, Mr. Abe said that the spending this time around would be better focused to bring about growth through investment in innovation. He said the government would also invest in measures that would help mitigate the decline in the Japanese population by encouraging families to have more children.

“To grow in a sustainable way, we must help create a virtuous cycle where companies actively borrow and invest, and in so doing raise employment and incomes,” Mr. Abe said.

“For that, it is extremely important that we adopt a growth strategy that gives everyone solid hope that the future of the Japanese economy lies in growth.”

Mr. Abe has assembled two panels of chief executives and academics, including Hiroshi Mikitani, chief executive of a major e-commerce company and a harsh critic of the old guard of economic policy makers, and Heizo Takenaka, a former economy minister and outspoken academic known for his disdain of pork-barrel spending.

Meanwhile, a more aggressive monetary policy designed to beat deflation could fall into place when the Bank of Japan’s board meets Jan. 20-21 for its monthly review.

Mr. Abe has leaned on Japan’s central bankers — whom he has criticized as too cautious — to commit to an inflation rate of at least 2 percent, which would help convince businesses that Japan would not arbitrarily reverse course on its easy money policy. For more than a decade, the rate of inflation has been flat or negative, reflecting languishing personal incomes and corporate profits.

Some at the central bank, still wary of the tremendous asset bubble that loose monetary policy set off in the late 1980s, have warned of the dangers of stoking inflation. The Bank of Japan’s governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, has also bristled at the idea of bankrolling public spending by buying more government bonds.

With its benchmark interest rate already near zero, the bank has few options left, other than to buy up government bonds and other financial assets if it is to inject money into the economy.

In an interview with the Nikkei business daily published Friday, Mr. Abe said he would seek in writing an agreement from the bank to pursue a target of 2 percent inflation, though he said the agreement would not set a deadline. He also said the bank should consider policies that would increase employment as much as possible.

Mr. Abe said that he hoped to pick as Mr. Shirakawa’s successor someone who shared the government’s position on inflation and employment, according to the interview. The central bank governor’s term runs out in April.

Hajime Takada, chief economist at the Mizuho Research Institute, said in a note to clients Friday that there were still too many unknowns to assess the effectiveness of Mr. Abe’s economic push.

But by setting a clearly pro-business policy agenda, Mr. Abe has started to change the mind-set of investors and corporations who had all but given up on growth — and for that, the new prime minister scores high, Mr. Takada said.

Read More..