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German renewable energy companies and bankers will meet officials in Berlin on Monday to discuss ways of preventing the financial crisis from casting a storm cloud over a vital domestic growth industry. Up to 30 companies and organisations are expected to outline the problems facing the renewables sector, whose bullish projections have been overshadowed by concerns about project finance, falling prices and delayed orders.

Norddeutsche Affinerie (NA) (NAFG.DE) expects a global copper shortage to keep business conditions good despite the financial crisis, Europe's biggest copper smelter said on Wednesday.

Cuts and delays to investment in Europe's energy infrastructure caused by the financial crisis and the recession will weaken future energy security and undermine the fight against climate change, a leading consultancy has warned.

Goldman Sachs on Monday cut its India growth estimate to 6.7 per cent from 9 per cent in the year ending March 2009 due to the knock-on effects of the global financial crisis.

Aluminium prices at LME and SHFE have stopped slumping at a low level since mid October, after major aluminium enterprises reduced production on the market downturn. Under the current economic recession and financial crisis, outputcut is not big enough to reverse the situation of surplus supply, said market analysts here, adding that it is hard to improve aluminium price in a short period. Currently, the whole aluminium industry is losing money

Instead, America's consumption binge drew support from two major asset bubbles-property and credit. Courtesy of cheap and freely available credit, in conjunction with record housing price appreciation, consumers tripled the rate of net equity extraction from their homes, from 3 percent of disposable personal income in 2001 to 9 percent in 2006. Only by levering increasingly overvalued homes could Americans go on the biggest consumption binge in modern history. And now those twin bubbles-property and credit-have burst, and so has the US consumption bubble: real consumer spending fell at an unprecedented 3.5 percent average annual rate in the two final quarters of 2008. While the original excesses were made in America, the rest of the world was delighted to go along for the ride. With the United States lacking in internal saving, it had to import surplus savings from abroad in order to grow-and ran massive current-account and trade deficits to attract that capital. This fit perfectly with the macro-imbalances of the export-led developing countries of Asia, whose exports exceeded a record 45 percent of regional GDP in 2007-fully ten percentage points higher than their share ten years earlier, in the depths of the Asian financial crisis. China led the charge, taking its exports from 20 percent, to 40 percent of its GDP over the past seven years alone. The export-led growth in developing Asia could well be described as a second-order bubble-in effect, a derivative of the one in US consumption.

A cable factory located in Lyudinovo, Russia, has laid off 40 people and cut the wages of the remaining personnel by 15%. The decision of the cable manufacturer, which had recently started up a new production line, is attributed to the global financial crisis. Plunging copper prices are a major threat to Russia's economy due to the high dependence of the country on commodity exports.

Nexans, the world's largest cable maker, has announced its sales results for Q1 2009. In the three months to March 31, sales amounted to 1.245 billion euros (US$1.61 billion), down by 28.5% compared with the same period in 2008 at constant metal prices. Net debt at the end of Q1 was reduced to 362 million euros (US$468 million) compared to 536 million euros (US$693 million) at the end of Q4 2008. The company said that in response to the economic crisis, it will accelerate restructuring and cut the workforce by 900. Nexans has restructured its business in Canada while it intends to shut down its Building Cable business in Germany. Further plans may be announced mainly in Europe.

Consumers attach little credibility to companies' environmental and social marketing messages, a study has found, in spite of the millions spent on "greening" the image of carmakers, oil companies and other industries. The study of 20,000 people in 10 countries, released yesterday by Havas Media, showed half of them are willing to pay a 10 per cent premium for sustainably produced goods and services in spite of the pressures of the economic crisis.

Amid the global economic crisis, one sector that has not contracted but has actually expanded is the utilities infrastructure in the Middle East. The government of Dubai announced in January that it will spend AED 37.7 billion (US$10.3 billion) as part of its 2009 budget. A considerable part will be spent on infrastructure projects and power networks will be a significant portion of this plan. According to data provided by Dow Wire and Cable, the regional demand for medium and high voltage cables amounts to 270,000 km and this is expected to rise in the next 2-3 years. While there is still growing demand for medium and high voltage cables, there is currently shrinking demand for smaller products such as building wire.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - The global economic crisis is jeopardizing efforts to help the world's growing number of slum dwellers, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday. The U.N. housing agency UN-Habitat, which is hosting a major meeting this week in the Kenyan capital, says the number of slum dwellers in the world could triple to 3 billion by 2050 if left unchecked.

That "evidence" relates to an article published by The Australian on May 28 which stated, "In Japan, the world's biggest importer of rare-earth metals, more than 10,000 tonnes per year about a fifth of the country's total annual consumption are thought to enter the country through a thriving black import network without which Japan would already be in a severe supply crisis, a senior government official said." We believe a black market exists, in this particular case, because of several actions taken by the Chinese government (by the way, the RE (rare earths) black market in Japan receives its supply from China). The biggest reason a black market exists however, relates to mining quotas and export restrictions. In addition, China has taken an active international M&A stance to make strategic investments.

Over the past six weeks, executives have become markedly more optimistic about current economic conditions and prospects for their national economies, a new McKinsey survey shows. Expectations started out so gloomy, however, that even now, fewer than a third expect an economic upturn this year, and two-thirds expect their nations' GDPs to decrease in 2009.\n\nSimilarly, at the company level, more executives still expect to shed workers than to hire, but the share expecting to decrease the workforce has fallen below half for the first time since January. And a full third of respondents now expect profits to increase in 2009, up 8 percent in six weeks. Furthermore, even though respondents see fallout from the crisis in a variety of financial and nonfinancial measures such as employee morale and the pace of innovation, strong majorities expect those effects to be short-lived.

Aurubis said that demand for its products bottomed in April and showed some recovery signs in May. As a result of weakening demand in Q1, the company cut copper wirerod output by 25% to 168,000t. The company planned to cut working hours in its copper wirerod plant in Hamburg but the measure was not implemented as demand strengthened. Luvata reported that its copper semis sales contracted on average by 25% y-o-y in Q1. The worst hit end-use sectors were the automotive and construction industries, which plunged by 40% y-o-y in Q1. In response to the economic crisis, the company has cut production in the US, Europe and China. Both Aurubis and Luvata said that as their customers have kept stocks to a minimum the market now experiences stabilisation. Luvata highlighted that its recent demand increase may be only the result of restocking. Also, extended summer holidays will impact this rebound.

Economic Growth, The Financial Crisis, and Peak Oil For several years, a swelling subculture of commentators (which includes the present author) has been forecasting a financial crash, basing this prognosis on the assessment that global oil production was about to peak. (2) Our reasoning went like this: Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet. This is an axiomatic observation with which everyone familiar with the mathematics of compounded arithmetic growth must agree, even if they hedge their agreement with vague references to "substitutability" and "demographic transitions." (3) This axiomatic limit to growth means that the rapid expansion in both population and per-capita consumption of resources that has occurred over the past century or two must cease at some particular time. But when is this likely to occur? The unfairly maligned Limits to Growth studies, published first in 1972 with periodic updates since, have attempted to answer the question with analysis of resource availability and depletion, and multiple scenarios for future population growth and consumption rates. The most pessimistic scenario in 1972 suggested an end of world economic growth around 2015. (4)

The European construction market in 2014 has entered a new phase of growth. After seven years of deep crisis, during which the market has lost 21% in volume, and after a further negative year 2013, EUROCONSTRUCT confirmed that 2014 will be the first year of recovery in construction output. Growth is expected to be moderate in 2014 (+1%) but it will consolidate in the near future: +2.1% in 2015 and +2.2% in the following two-year period.

* Aurubis Group, the large German copper smelter and semis producer, announced on 13th December that its operating earnings before tax for the fiscal year Q4 2011-Q3 2012, had increased to EUR296M from EUR292M the previous year (US$385.5M from US$380.3M). Despite the headline increase in profitability, which was driven by the group's smelting unit, Aurubis reported that profits from "copper products were considerably down on the prior-year level due to weak markets for rod and shapes." Operating profits at the group's semis business fell to EUR10.1M this fiscal year from EUR49.7M the prior year (US$13.2M from US$64.7M), with Aurubis citing "the economic influences of the European debt crisis" as a factor weighing on the demand for copper products. Aurubis reported that copper tube output had fallen by 18% to 646,000t in 2011/2012 from 785,000t in 2010/11, copper continuous cast shapes output had fallen by 17% to 164,000t from 197,000t , whilst the output of flat rolled products fared better with output roughly unchanged at 217,000t.