May 12, 2005

Bloomberg: China's inflation accelerated to close to the fastest pace in 11 years, underscoring the government's challenge of taming prices without triggering an economic slump as export demand fades. Consumer prices rose 8.5% in April from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said, after gaining 8.3% in March. That compared with the 8.2% median estimate of 22 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

For the first time since December 2005, futures traders are turning bullish on the dollar. The difference in the number of wagers by hedge funds and other large speculators on a gain in the greenback versus the euro, known as net longs, was 21,315 on April 29, figures from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington show. There were net-short positions in each of the previous 123 weeks. At the same time, traders have stepped up their purchases of options that profit from the dollar's