▪ Working time regulation: measures tightening regulatory requirements on working time, increasing rights and conditions of part-time workers, tightening availability of or access to childcare, increasing generosity or duration of parental/paternity/maternity leaves, or increasing access to sabbatical or educational leaves.
Some products, including defoamers, gluteraldhyde, phosphate and polyphosphate chemistries, pulp mill surfactants, antiscalants, and pitch control surfactants, will increase 30.0%. These price increases are driven by increased energy and raw material costs, tightening availability of some raw materials and rising freight costs, said the Naperville, Ill.-based company.
"But almost any measure saw rising interest rates and tightened credit availability for many borrowers.
Last year's collapse of Ansett, Australia's second-largest airline, after Qantas, has tightened seat availability.
"A scenario of economic uncertainty and tightened credit availability, amid rising costs for energy and other commodities, is not a conducive environment for business investment," said Daniel J. Meckstroth, the chief economist of the Manufacturers Alliance, a trade group, in a note.
The survey found that at many medical centers, officials had tightened the availability of drugs like fentanyl, the opiumlike drug that is most frequently abused, and increased the amount of substance-abuse education for doctors.
One positive development was that deposits were flowing back to banks in the vulnerable economies; another that April's lending survey showed that banks were not tightening credit availability as much as before.But the ECB's council met in troubled times, in a troubled city.
The Fed thereby sees its role as tightening the availability of credit when the economy is reaching its"natural limits"or as loosening the supply of money when things are sluggish.
But Mr. Bosco said that as this swindle has spread, at a time when demand has pushed up rates, both airlines and hotels have begun to tighten up on the availability of such discounts for legitimate travel agents while training their employees to weed out fake travel agents.
Setting a target for the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, as in a QE regime, could thus have the perverse effect of forcing the Fed to tighten the terms and availability of its lending at times when market conditions were worsening, and vice versa.
