27/12/2011 World Business Report

BBC News. Now for the latest financial news and World Business

Report. Welcome to World Business Report. Can the US housing market

struck off the gloom of foreclosures?

First China, now India. Closer economic links.

And what is hot and what is not in technology. We ask the experts.

Later today we will get more data on the US housing market. There are

signs that American's housing market is starting to improve, but

can it last? Since the housing bust many homes have been repossessed

and another 8 million are likely to face foreclosure over the next four

mac years. We visited one neighbourhood in New York that has

been hard hit. In the US more than 6 million homes have been seized by

banks since 2006. The suffering has not been shared equally. This house

in East New York is the role rather than the exception because the

state would have the highest rate of foreclosure in the entire city.

Across the road, this property has been seized by the Occupy Wall

Street movement. By moving in, they want to draw attention to the

plight of homeowners, and the communities they live in. This

house has been foreclosed for over three years. It has been illegally

used for drug activity and all kinds of illegal activity.

increase in crime is not the only side effect. Kids are living at

home up longer. The elderly are moving back in with their middle

age keeps. You are seeing a different set of household

composition. -- middle aged children. For a lot of people,

staying in place, or renting right now, makes a lot of sense. Back in

East New York, this woman -- this man is pleased with his new

neighbours. I love it. Now you have somebody occupying the house that

cares about it. They care for the upkeep of the house. The house is

no longer NT, but with so many properties still in foreclosure,

the year ahead is unlikely to herald an end to the crisis. -- is

no longer empty. Following a visit to China, the

Japanese prime minister is going till India this Tuesday to hold

talks with his Indian counterpart. Let's get more with our

correspondent in Singapore. It is expected that the dollar will

dominate talks. What are we expecting? That is right. The

dollar dominating the talks in quite an unusual way. Japan and

India are in the final stages of deciding on a dollar swap agreement.

They are expected to reach agreement during the Japanese park

-- the Japanese leader's visit this week. They are going to meet

tomorrow and it is widely reported that they will agree to a deal up

to $10 billion. This means that Tokyo would provide capital when

the route he plunges against the US currency. It is all to safeguard

against the European debt crisis. - - when the Indian currency plunges.

This could hit India's exports. It has already taken a toll on Japan's

exports. Doing this might also help Japan as India is quite an

important export market for Japan as well. The countries are expected

to discuss a whole series of different things. They are

discussing a Japanese loan to build a freight railway between New Delhi

and Mumbai. Japan and India launched talks in 2010 on a Nuclear

Corporation that would allow Tokyo to export some of its nuclear

technology to India. But of course the nuclear accident earlier this

year has clouded that deal. Thank you very much.

The ongoing crisis in the eurozone and sluggish consumer confidence

risks sending Britain into recession according to a leading

think tank. The Institute for Policy Research says that Britain

faces a bleak start to 2012 but suggested any slowdown could be

eased by a fall in inflation. That could boost consumer spending power.

It has warned the whole eurozone economy could slip back into

recession given the need to adopt austerity measures.

The worst Nigerian offshore oil spilled been more than one decade

has been contained. Officials say an investigation into how the still

happened is still ongoing. Saudi Arabia has posted an $81.6

billion budget surplus for 2011. Revenues for the oil rich company

soared, beating official forecasts. The plans to reduce spending next

year. Cuba will expand its small business

reforms in 2012 to allow people in a growing number of industries to

operate independently. State media reports that private businesses

only became legal two years ago, beginning with hairdressers and

expanding to many other industries. From the new year the programme

will be widened to allow people working in carpentry and others to

set up firms. It has been the year when the

smartphone ownership doubled and the social networks were used to

organise revolutions and riots. We have seen electronic readers take

off, threatening the future of the printed book, and a video game make

more money more rapidly than any Hollywood movie. We look back at

the technology of 2011. London's Olympic Park, where everyone will

be looking in 2012. It is a good place to ask to top internet users

to ask how technology has changed. First, gadgets. It has been the

year of the portable screen. The iPad, the Kindle, the smartphone.

have been bowled over by the size of gadgets. Paddlers have gone from

the size of the original iPad to something much smaller. Phones are

getting larger. We are reading books on wine. The ability to be

sitting on it your sofa and just pressing a button and three minutes

later is there... We had that there in the past with music. We are

It has also been the year when we started to talk to our gadgets.

Speech recognition still has its limits. You are an idiot. I respect

you. That is nice! I am going to show you some pictures that reflect

the technology. It was a year when Blackberry and Sony have to

apologise as their services went off line. Social media became a

tool for organising everything from revolutions to write. -- to riots.

There will be a new form of television, which will be

incredibly crisp and clear, a sort of super high-definition. We are

looking forward to receiving much faster speeds on our mobile phones

when we are out and about. It will not come in next year but possibly

in 2013. New ideas continue to change the way we see the world.

Predicting the technology winners, though, is as hard as ever.

A quick look at the numbers. Asian shares are holding steady.

Investors taking to the sideline before US markets open later.