Temple Run was downloaded more than 2.5 million times on Christmas Day

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Former President George H.W. Bush in intensive care: spokesman

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Former President George H.W. Bush is in the intensive care unit of a Houston hospital and is in “guarded condition,” family spokesman Jim McGrath said Wednesday.

“The President is alert and conversing with medical staff, and is surrounded by family,” McGrath said in a statement.

Bush was admitted to the intensive care unit on Sunday, McGrath said.

(Reporting By Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Paul Thomasch)

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Billy Crystal channels real-life role in “Parental Guidance”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After a decade away from the big screen, funnyman Billy Crystal has mined his real-life experiences as a grandfather and is back in the holiday season movie “Parental Guidance.”

The film, which opened in U.S. theaters on Christmas, stars Crystal as a recently fired baseball announcer, who agrees to watch his three grandchildren with his wife (Bette Midler), while his daughter and her husband go on a business trip.

Crystal, 64, sat down with Reuters to talk about the film, being a grandparent and why he won’t host the Oscars ceremony anymore.

Q: You have not been on the big screen in a starring role since 2002′s “Analyze That.” Did you miss making movies?

A: “I spent over four years doing my one-man Broadway show, ’700 Sundays’ and didn’t care about doing movies. I just so love being in front of live audiences. The play is more satisfying than anything. I’m not interrupted by planes flying overhead, waiting for them to light and all those gruesome slow things on a movie. But really, the last five years were spent getting this movie made.”

Q: How did “Parental Guidance” become your return to film?

A: “When I wrote the first story for this movie, my wife Janice and I babysat for our daughter Jenny while she went away with her husband. We had six days with their girls, all alone. It was an eye-opener. When you’re not used to that energy, it’s tough. On the 7th day I rested and came in to the office and said, ‘Here’s the idea for the movie.’”

Q: What was eye-opening about those six days?

A: “The eye-opener was the bible that we were given before they left town about what to say (to the kids), what to do, all the rules, don’t do this, don’t do that, this child has to be taken here. They have my respect of how they programmed their days and weeks. It’s insane what they have to do nowadays for schooling and parenting. It’s wild.”

Q: Quite a difference between your childhood and the grandkids’ childhood, right?

A: “When I was a kid growing up, it was basically ‘Go outside and play and I’ll see you at dinner.’ There was no thought that there were bad people out there. There was such a carefree wonderful trust which forced you to use your imagination, which also bonded you with the best of you, and your friends. We didn’t have that ‘inside’ thing like videogames. My only ‘inside’ thing was watching the Yankees. Otherwise everything was outside.”

Q: Speaking of the Yankees, your well-documented lifelong love of baseball is incorporated in to the film with your character being a ball-game announcer. That must have been fun to do.

A: “I love the game and I thought it was a really interesting occupation we hadn’t seen before. And a good one for me to play because I love it. I wanted my character to have something he loved doing where I didn’t have to fake it.”

Q: In being absent from the silver screen for a while, did you find that the movie-making business has changed much?

A: “The studios are so concerned with quadrants (capturing four major demographic groups of moviegoers – men, woman and those over and under 25). I’d never heard of these things when I was in my early years of making movies. You just did them. There was no interference. Now it’s a whole different ball game. They’re so worried: ‘Who’s going to come?’ Well, there’s 77 million American who are babyboomers. That’s a huge audience who wants to laugh and have a story told to them that doesn’t have bombs and spies and killing.”

Q: Does “Parental Guidance” reflect where are you now at this stage of your life?

A: “I was fortunate to be in a great romantic comedy about falling in love (1989′s ‘When Harry Met Sally’). I wrote the original story for my turning 40, ‘City Slickers’ (in 1991), which became a huge hit and a very liked movie. And now ‘Parental Guidance’ happened at this point in my life. I relate to it as a parent and a grandparent.”

Q: You will be a grandfather for the fourth time in March. What do you like best about that role?

A: “It’s so hard to understand how you can love someone so much that’s not yours, but extensions of you. I’m always so moved seeing my girls pregnant, and seeing them move on in their lives. I’m going to turn 65 on March 14. My wife’s birthday is the 16th. The baby’s due the 18th. So we’ve got maybe a straight flush happening here. That would be the greatest present of all – a healthy new baby.”

Q: Last year you hosted the Oscar ceremony for the ninth time, making you the second most-used host after the late Bob Hope. Are you gunning for his title?

A: “I’m not even close. I’ve done 9, he’s done 19 and neither one of us are doing it again. It’s hard to say, ‘Can’t wait to do it again,’ but I can wait.”

(Reporting By Zorianna Kit, Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Cynthia Osterman)

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America, Please End the Small-Minded Policy Blather

The United States is a country that likes to be taken seriously. It’s also a country that just spent upwards of an entire year and $ 5 billion on elections that achieved approximately nothing. While the politics industry was consumed by urgent, domestic concerns—can you believe that Mitt Romney wants an elevator for his cars?—one or two things were happening overseas. You know, meltdown in Europe. Political collapse in Japan. Civil war in Syria. Scandals, slowdown, and a leadership transition in China.

Sometimes it was difficult to retain focus on Clint Eastwood’s empty chair, Ann Romney’s horse, and Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee lineage. Somehow the country rose to the challenge, taking time to weigh which was more troubling, Romney’s method of dog transport or Barack Obama’s memory of dog meat being tough when he tasted it as a boy in Indonesia.

The British say Americans lack a sense of the absurd. Not so. Consider the Oct. 22 presidential debate on foreign policy. Mostly it was about domestic policy, though the candidates did note that China, Iran, and several other foreign nations exist. Events in Europe weren’t worth mentioning, but Israel was a friend, they agreed. Discussing geostrategy, Obama explained to Romney: “We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go under water, nuclear submarines.” Romney was unfazed. “We will stand with Israel,” he affirmed.

The same absurdist tradition extends to fiscal policy. The country’s political class maintains it’s been grappling with fundamental questions about the limits of markets and the role of government, when it’s mostly been arguing about the top rate of income tax, a topic so narrow it’s almost beside the point. In the negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff, real choices about fiscal ends and means have been excluded by tacit agreement, just as they were during the campaigns.

The White House talks as though adequate public provision, including an enlarged commitment to publicly supported health insurance, can be financed by a sliver of taxpayers at the top; everybody else gets something for nothing. Republicans offer a similar deal. Taxes can be driven lower by deep spending cuts (details to come) which the country would hardly notice. That’s the great debate about the country’s direction?

A more attentive political class would have noticed, first, that fiscal policy is not merely a domestic issue, and the global economy is still a dangerous place. Five years after the onset of the Great Recession, the biggest and most populous economies are stressed and many governments are flailing. As an exporter, outward investor, and record-breaking debtor, the U.S. is bound up with all of them. A worst-case scenario in Europe could send the U.S. back into recession. The same Europe mentioned only in passing in that Oct. 22 presidential debate.

The world economy is growing at between 3 percent and 4 percent—a crawl by ordinary standards. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the advanced economies will grow next year by just 1.5 percent. The euro area is back in recession, and Japan could be headed that way. The volume of world trade grew by just 3.2 percent in 2012, and the IMF expects growth of less than 5 percent next year. Compare that with the four years leading up to the crisis: Trade volumes grew by an average of nearly 9 percent annually. The Great Recession isn’t over.

Emerging and developing economies were a source of strength when the downturn began, but that phase has ended. China’s growth slowed this year with the shrinking of its export markets and after the government tightened access to credit, fearing a real estate bubble. There are hopes that Xi Jinping, freshly installed as head of the Communist Party’s fifth-generation leadership, will have a bigger appetite for economic reform than his predecessor. Still, expect setbacks. The expansion has been powered by investment in infrastructure of dubious viability, financed with short-term bank loans rather than bonds—a formula for financial frailty.

In 2012 many investors decided India’s economic reforms had stalled. Too little infrastructure remains India’s problem, as the biggest power outages in a decade illustrated. Business confidence sagged, and output slowed. In recent weeks, Manmohan Singh’s government has renewed its commitment to liberalization. We’ll see.

Brazil’s government thought it was pioneering a new model combining social inclusion and rapid growth, but the global slowdown and its own efforts to stem inflation cut growth to just 1.5 percent in 2012. Its leaders said the U.S. had started a “currency war” and was resorting to “monetary protectionism.” (It’s called quantitative easing in the north.) Growth slowed in Russia and South Africa as well. Blame weak governments and strong economic ties to Europe.

In all, the BRICs aren’t what they used to be. The developing countries in the aggregate grew by only a little more than 5 percent this year, down from over 7 percent in 2010. IMF forecasters expect little improvement in 2013.

Political paralysis plagued Japan all year. The Liberal Democratic Party’s landslide election victory this month and Shinzo Abe’s return as prime minister could make a difference. Abe has promised a dose of economic radicalism—starting with stronger fiscal and monetary stimulus. But Japan’s debt is already so vast that his budget options are few. Heavy spending on reconstruction after the earthquake buoyed growth this year. Forecasters expect it to subside again.

Britain’s experiment with “expansionary austerity” failed. Its overdeveloped financial sector, overextended mortgage borrowers, and exports to the euro area all continue to weigh on demand. With a currency of its own, the Bank of England resorted to quantitative easing and tolerated persistent overshoots of its inflation target. That helped, but growth stayed slow and the economy contracted again.

Which brings us to the central figure in our great global drama. Despite the recent lull in financial markets, the euro area still tops the list of dangers. Massive unemployment in the currency zone’s periphery and, as yet, no real prospect of recovery make political upheaval and a new round of financial alarm all too probable. Europe’s banking system is far from safe. The recent agreement to create a single bank supervisor for the euro countries is welcome but stops well short of a credible plan to deal with the main problem—which is to recapitalize distressed banks without driving peripheral-country governments to insolvency.

A big new setback in Europe is all too possible. It would shrink American export markets further and could trigger a new round of panic in financial markets. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has tried to influence developments in Europe, Japan, and the big emerging economies, but these efforts to persuade haven’t worked. What the U.S. should do instead is use its own financial resilience as a beacon of reassurance to financial markets.

In practical terms, what does that require? Like it or not, fiscal policy is crucial. On current policies, America’s net federal debt would rise from roughly 70 percent in 2012 to more than 90 percent after 10 years and roughly 200 percent by 2040. Thereafter it rises literally off the charts. The bargaining position that the White House brought to the fiscal-cliff talks is essentially its budget from last spring, which proposes to stabilize the debt ratio at a level a little higher than now: between 75 percent and 80 percent.

The experience of other countries suggests that stabilizing the debt at such a high level isn’t enough. Japan has shown it’s possible to run net debt as high as 135 percent of gross domestic product—the ratio estimated for 2012—without provoking a bond-market backlash. For that, though, thank the country’s captive savers, a cultural legacy the U.S. can’t count on. And whatever Abe, the incoming prime minister, may say, Japan’s space for further fiscal stimulus is close to zero. The lesson is that chronic inattention to fiscal control eventually kills fiscal flexibility. In the next crisis, you’ll need it and it won’t be there.

In Europe, put Greece aside as an outlier; Italy, one of the region’s biggest and richest economies, is more to the point. Its ability to borrow has been called into question at a debt ratio not much higher (and with a flatter trajectory) than America’s. The debt ratio of Spain, another distressed euro-area borrower, has been lower than America’s throughout. Neither Italy nor Spain is able to print currency to service its debts.

Just where the debt limit is for an economy attached to a mint, such as the U.S., is impossible to say—until the economy encounters it, a discovery best avoided. The real lesson from the rest of the world is not about exact debt-ratio thresholds, but that fiscal space eventually runs out, and when it does you’re in trouble.

Look at it this way: The fiscal response to the Great Recession increased the U.S. debt ratio by some 35 percentage points of GDP between 2007 and 2012. Let’s suppose, like the White House, that the fiscal stimulus was money well spent. The next economic calamity would presumably call for another robust intervention. Can the country plausibly hope to increase its debt by another 20 percentage points of GDP, let alone another 35 percentage points, starting at a ratio of 80 percent?

America’s goal should be to bring the debt ratio back down to the point at which it can safely contemplate another big fiscal intervention if it needs to make one. That sounds hard. It will demand a different kind of discussion than the one Washington is presently having.

Yet it’s feasible. Policymakers even have a blueprint: the plan designed by the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission, a panel the president summoned—and then ignored. It proposed a fiscal adjustment roughly twice as powerful as the one being framed in the fiscal-cliff talks. This would stabilize the debt ratio by the middle of this decade, then reduce it to 60 percent of GDP by 2024 and 40 percent by 2037. The commission showed that if the government looks for savings in every category of spending, the cuts aren’t fierce. Broadening the country’s depleted tax base by closing loopholes and exemptions (including preferences for investment income) could raise ample revenue without higher marginal rates.

Naturally, there’s more to economic policy than the budget. A demanding global policy agenda also needs American attention and leadership. After the crash, there was genuine international cooperation. The resurgence of protectionism many predicted as the global contraction got worse never happened. Central banks coordinated their responses effectively.

On the other hand, governments pursued financial reform mostly at the national level. Defects in the multinational Basel process for regulating bank capital helped cause the crisis in the first place, and there’s no substitute for effective coordination in this area. America must take the lead. Trade protection didn’t explode after 2008, but the Doha Round of new liberalization is defunct. The U.S. should look to revive it. Worldwide, efforts to insure against the dangers of climate change are flagging. Here too, American leadership, disgracefully overdue, is needed.

At home, suppressing the instinct to obsess over points of disagreement, Washington could make common cause over education and skills. A little less navel-gazing might scare the town straight. For decades after 1945, the U.S. increased the proportion of its workforce with a college education faster than anywhere else, and the economy reaped the benefits. That advantage is at an end. By the early 2000s a little over 40 percent of Americans aged 25-34 had post-secondary education, about the same proportion as those aged 55-64. In other advanced economies, the younger generation is typically much better educated than people approaching retirement—and in a dozen or so countries, rates of higher education for 25- to 34-year-olds have surpassed America’s.

The U.S. still has priceless assets in the vibrancy of its private sector and its culture of innovation and risk-taking, but its skills and education deficits are a big and worsening concern—holding back growth, contributing to income inequality, and adding to poverty that’s already high by advanced-economy standards. Immigration reform offers a partial short-term remedy. Longer term, education policy requires an overhaul.

Policies like these needn’t divide the country. They aren’t a matter of Left or Right. Members of both parties backed Simpson-Bowles and support liberal trade and pro-skills immigration reform. Prominent Democrats and Republicans advocate far-reaching education reform. Scaling these ideas up to national policy, though, requires a broader consensus and the willingness to concentrate on practical points of agreement, rather than totems of doctrinal correctness.

Washington can do better than that. Consensus is a lost art that many voters hoped President Obama would rediscover. He achieved a lot in his first term—the health-care reform he’d promised in the 2008 campaign and a fiscal stimulus that likely avoided an economic catastrophe—but he didn’t mend America’s broken, inward-looking, small-minded politics. Starting now, he gets another chance.

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VP says Chavez up, walking; doubts persist

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Vice President Nicolas Maduro surprised Venezuelans with a Christmas Eve announcement that President Hugo Chavez is up and walking two weeks after cancer surgery in Cuba, but the news did little to ease uncertainty surrounding the leader’s condition.

Sounding giddy, Maduro told state television Venezolana de Television that he had spoken by phone with Chavez for 20 minutes Monday night. It was the first time a top Venezuelan government official had confirmed talking personally with Chavez since the Dec. 11 operation, his fourth cancer surgery since 2011.

“He was in a good mood,” Maduro said. “He was walking, he was exercising.”

Chavez supporters reacted with relief, but the statement inspired more questions, given the sparse information the Venezuelan government has provided so far about the president’s cancer. Chavez has kept secret various details about his illness, including the precise location of the tumors and the type of cancer. His long-term prognosis remains a mystery.

Dr. Michael Pishvaian, an oncologist at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center in Washington, said it was an encouraging sign that Chavez was walking, and it indicated he would be able to return to Venezuela relatively soon. But he said the long term outlook remained poor.

“It’s definitely good news. It means that he is on the road to recover fully from the surgery,” Pishvaian said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “The overall prognosis is still pretty poor. He likely has a terminal diagnosis with his cancer that has come back.”

Pishvaian and other outside doctors have said that given the details Chavez has provided about his cancer, it is most likely a soft-tissue sarcoma.

Chavez first underwent surgery for an unspecified type of pelvic cancer in Cuba in June 2011 and went back this month after tests had found a return of malignant cells in the same area where tumors were previously removed.

Venezuelan officials said that, following the six-hour surgery two weeks ago, Chavez suffered internal bleeding that was stanched and a respiratory infection that was being treated.

Maduro’s announcement came just hours after Information Minister Ernesto Villegas read a statement saying Chavez was showing “a slight improvement with a progressive trend.”

Dr. Carlos Castro, director of the Colombian League against Cancer, an association that promotes cancer prevention, treatment and education, said Maduro’s announcement was too vague to paint a clear picture of Chavez’s condition.

“It’s possible (that he is walking) because everything is possible,” Castro told AP. “They probably had him sit in up in bed and take two steps.”

“It’s unclear what they mean by exercise. Was it four little steps?” he added. “I think he is still in critical condition.”

Maduro’s near-midnight announcement came just as Venezuelan families were gathering for traditional late Christmas Eve dinners and setting off the usual deafening fireworks that accompany the festivities. There was still little outward reaction on a quiet Christmas morning.

Danny Moreno, a software technician watching her 2-year-old son try out his new tricycle, was among the few people at a Caracas plaza who said she had heard Maduro’s announcement. She said she saw a government Twitter message saying an announcement was coming and her mother rushed to turn on the TV.

“We all said, thank God, he’s okay,” she said, smiling.

Dr. Gustavo Medrano, a lung specialist at the Centro Medico hospital in Caracas, said if Chavez is talking, it suggests he is breathing on his own despite the respiratory infection and is not in intensive care. But Medrano said he remained skeptical about Maduro’s comments and could deduce little from them about Chavez’s prognosis for recovery.

“I have no idea because if it was such a serious, urgent, important operation, and that was 14 days ago, I don’t think he could be walking and exercising after a surgery like that,” Medrano said.

Over the weekend, Chavez’s ally, Bolivian President Evo Morales, made a lightning visit to Cuba that only added to the uncertainty.

Journalists had been summoned to cover his arrival and departure in Havana, but hours later that invitation was canceled. No explanation was given, though it could have been due to confusion over Morales’ itinerary as he apparently arrived later than initially scheduled.

Cuban state media published photos of President Raul Castro receiving Morales at the airport and said he came “to express his support” for Chavez, his close ally, but did not give further details. He left Sunday without making any public comments.

For the second day in a row Tuesday, Morales made no mention of his trip to Cuba during public events in Bolivia.

Yet more questions surround Chavez’s political future, with the surgery coming two months after he won re-election to a six-year term.

If he is unable to continue in office, the Venezuelan Constitution calls for new elections to be held. Chavez has asked his followers to back Maduro, his hand-picked successor, in that event.

Venezuelan officials have said Chavez might not return in time for his Jan. 10 inauguration.

Opposition leaders have argued that the constitution does not allow the president’s swearing-in to be postponed, and say new elections should be called if Chavez is unable to take the oath on time.

But government officials have said the constitution lets the Supreme Court administer the oath of office at any time if the National Assembly is unable to do it Jan. 10 as scheduled.

___

Associated Press writers Peter Orsi in Havana, Vivian Sequera in Caracas, Camilo Hernandez in Bogota, Colombia, and Paola Flores in La Paz, Bolivia, contributed to this report.

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8 Festive Christmas Tumblrs, Presented by Santa Dogs

365 Days of Christmas

Image courtesy of Flickr, nicktakespics

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: 10 Holiday Stock Photos That Make Your Christmas Look Normal]

If the endless loop of Wham and Mariah Carey Christmas tunes still hasn’t put you in the holiday mood, let the Internet help.

SEE ALSO: 20 Amazing Christmas Surprises

[More from Mashable: Now and Then: 10 Awesome Past and Present Pics]

We ho, ho, ho‘ed around Tumblr in our digital sleigh to track down eight Christmas-themed Tumblr pages. As if the jolly Tumblrs weren’t enough, we also paired each of our favorites with a dog dressed like Santa Claus — or Santa Paws.

Merry Christmas, Internet!

Image courtesy of Flickr, H.L.I.T.

Click here to view this gallery.

Image courtesy of Flickr, jacilluch

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide

About one in three children in the U.S. are now overweight, and since the 1980s the number of children who are obese has more than tripled. But a new study of 26.7 million young children from low-income families shows that in this group of kids, the tidal wave of obesity might finally be receding.Being obese as a child not only increases the risk of early-life health problems, such as joint problems, pre-diabetes and social stigmatization, but it also dramatically increases the likelihood of being obese later in life, which can lead to chronic diseases, including cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Children as young as 2 years of age can be obese–and even extremely obese. Early childhood obesity rates, which bring higher health care costs throughout a kid’s life, have been especially high among lower-income families.”This is the first national study to show that the prevalence of obesity and extreme obesity among young U.S. children may have begun to decline,” the researchers noted in a brief report published online December 25 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. (Reports earlier this year suggested that childhood obesity rates were dropping in several U.S. cities.)The study examined rates of obesity (body mass index calculated by age and gender to be in the 95th percentile or higher–for example, a BMI above 20 for a 2-year-old male–compared with reference growth charts) and extreme obesity (BMI of more than 120 percent above that of the 95th percentile of the reference populations) in children ages 2 to 4 in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The researchers, led by Liping Pan, of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, combed through 12 years of data (1998 to 2010) from the Pediatric Nutritional Surveillance System, which includes information on roughly half of all children on the U.S. who are eligible for federal health care and nutrition assistance.A subtle but important shift in early childhood obesity rates in this low-income population seems to have begun in 2003. Obesity rates increased from 13.05 percent in 1998 to 15.21 percent in 2003. Soon, however, obesity rates began decreasing, reaching 14.94 percent by 2010. Extreme obesity followed a similar pattern, increasing from 1.75 percent to 2.22 percent from 1998 to 2003, but declining to 2.07 percent by 2010.Although these changes might seem small, the number of children involved makes for huge health implications. For example, each drop of just one tenth of a percentage point represents some 26,700 children in the study population alone who are no longer obese or extremely obese. And if these trends are occurring in the rest of the population, the long-term health and cost implications are massive.Public health agencies and the Obama Administration have made battling childhood obesity a priority, although these findings suggest that early childhood obesity rates, at least, were already beginning to decline nearly a decade ago. Some popular prevention strategies include encouraging healthier eating (by reducing intake of highly processed and high-sugar foods and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption) and increased physical activity (both at school and at home).The newly revealed trends “indicate modest recent progress of obesity prevention among young children,” the authors noted. “These finding may have important health implications because of the lifelong health risks of obesity and extreme obesity in early childhood.”

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs.Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
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Britain’s royal family attends Christmas services

LONDON (AP) — Britain‘s royal family is attending Christmas Day church services — with a few notable absences.

Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, Queen Elizabeth II arrived at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk. She was accompanied in a Bentley by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie.

Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other members of the royal family.

Three familiar faces were missing from the family outing. Prince William is spending the holiday with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury. Prince Harry is serving with British troops in Afghanistan.

Later Tuesday, the queen will deliver her traditional, pre-recorded Christmas message, which for the first time will be broadcast in 3D.

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China consumers driving economic rebound: survey

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s consumers are leading an uneven recovery in the world’s second biggest economy that has retailers expecting stronger sales in six months, early results of a national survey showed on Wednesday.

The China Beige Book survey of more than 2,000 executives revealed that the retail sector had the strongest revenue growth and business expectations in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The survey broadly detected a mild economic recovery with the hard-hit sectors of real estate, mining and manufacturing – to a lesser extent – joining retail at the head of the upswing.

“The revenue growth pickup was notable in luxuries and durable goods – furniture, appliances, and autos,” said the survey, conducted between October 26 and December 2 by New York-based CBB International and based on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s economic report of the same name.

“Retailers’ mood remains quite hopeful, with 72 percent forecasting higher sales in six months, up 4 points on last quarter. A remarkably low 6 percent foresee declines,” it said, adding that 61 percent of retailers reported higher sales in the Q4 survey than in Q3.

The biggest bounces were seen in coastal Guangdong province, Beijing, the northeast and central regions of China – locations which Q3′s survey found had the biggest spending falls.

The retail rebound was not evenly distributed, however, with Shanghai and the southwest region recording falls in spending.

The survey’s findings are reflected in the most recent raft of economic indicators from China, revealing a mild rebound taking hold in Q4, and in policymaker comments.

China’s retail sales grew 14.9 percent year-on-year in November, ahead of the 14.6 percent forecast in a Reuters poll.

China is on course to end 2012 with the slowest full year of growth since 1999 and while the 7.7 percent rate forecast in a benchmark Reuters poll is way above the world’s other major economies, it is far below the roughly 10 percent annual growth seen for most of the last 30 years.

Weakness in the external environment remains a key drag on an economy in which exports generated 31 percent of gross domestic product in 2011, according to World Bank data, and where an estimated 200 million jobs are supported by foreign investment, or in factories producing for overseas markets.

RECOVERING, REBALANCING

The upside to the patchiness of the recovery is that it is being driven by services, which are calibrated more towards domestic demand. Geographic rebalancing away from prosperous coastal areas was also evident in the survey, with firms in the western region recording the highest revenue growth in Q4.

The survey had mixed findings for labor markets, with a 3 point rise to 34 percent in the proportion of firms citing an increased availability of unskilled labor, while 20 percent said shortages had increased.

Some 34 percent of firms increased their workforces in Q4 from Q3. Wage rises were reported by 52 percent of respondents.

Bankers questioned in the survey said credit conditions eased in Q4, but fewer firms borrowed. Meanwhile, banks and firms said loan rejections rose slightly, to 16 percent, and exposure to companies with excess production capacity was cut.

“Few corporate loans went to new customers: three-fifths of bankers say under 20 percent did — an astonishingly small number,” the survey said.

“Most were debt rollovers or loan increases for existing clients. This is not yet a period of strong expansion.”

The China Beige Book survey of face-to-face and telephone interviews compares conditions with the previous quarter and asks respondents to anticipate conditions three and six months ahead.

The survey sample includes executives from manufacturing, retail, service, transport, real estate and construction, farming, and mining. Respondents ran businesses of every size from the micro-level – employing up to 19 staff – to large firms with more than 500 employees. It also canvassed opinions from 160 bank loan officers and branch managers.

A detailed report of the survey’s full findings will be published in early January.

(Reporting by Nick Edwards; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Economy News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: China consumers driving economic rebound: survey
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