▪ 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.
One-week repo rates moved up to 10.77% overnight as authorities' tighten availability of credit.
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 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.
"As had been the case in previous cyclical episodes, a relatively low real Federal funds rate now appeared appropriate for a time to counter the factors that were restraining growth, including the slide in housing activity and prices, the tightening of credit availability and the drop in equity prices," the summary recounted.
Concerns about potential losses also undermined confidence in wholesale bank funding markets, leading to further increases in bank borrowing costs and a tightening of credit availability from banks.
