But he did not do a very good job of making the case in Parliament this week - which may partly explain why Mr Osborne came out of this week surprisingly well.
Reports say the Diwali festival in India has kept Indian gold buyers out of the market this week, which has added to the downside price pressure in the gold market this week.
Gold prices are also feeling some selling pressure this week from the fact China is celebrating the lunar new year this week, which has curtailed physical demand for the precious yellow metal coming out of Asia.
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Congress comes back from its Thanksgiving break this week, so there will likely be some more news on the fiscal cliff front this week, which could be market-sensitive.
School started last week which means that this week, extracurricular activities have started in earnest.
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He is expected to announce this week which of the players have accepted new deals.
But a message urging restraint has been sounded by Pakistan's crashing stockmarket, which this week hit a five-year low.
Exporters' woes have been aggravated by the strength of the peso, which this week hit its highest level since mid-1998.
Sourcefire announced their Advanced Malware Protection capability this past week which leverages what they call their collective security intelligence cloud.
Turkey, Syria's onetime ally which this week formally called for Mr. Assad to step down, could also push through its own promised sanctions.
It also frustrated the European Commission, which this week put forward proposals to reform the CAP (see our story on European agriculture).
It follows the publication of a report earlier this week which partly blamed staff shortages on the death of a seven-year-old boy.
Germany, which this week was warned of a possible debt downgrade, is fearful that it is already being asked to pay too much.
The growth in sales last month came despite figures released this week which suggested a sharp drop in footfall on the high street in Scotland.
Outside of China and India (which this week reported 8.8% second-quarter growth compared with a year earlier), developing Asia remains heavily dependent on external demand.
The new Honeywell does not have the acquisitiveness of Tyco (which this week said it was once more in talks to buy a big British industrial group, Williams Holdings).
She also highlighted a report earlier this week which argued that the international evidence did not show any clear link between performance-related pay for teachers and pupils' test results.
Now Mr Arafat has embarked on a diplomatic blitz, which this week included a meeting with Islamic finance ministers in Morocco and an audience with the pope in Rome.
Oxfam, a British-based charity, released a report this week which describes the link between poverty and educational success measured by enrolment, the proportion of children completing four years of school, and girls' learning achievements.
The European Central Bank (ECB), which this week stopped conducting some monetary-policy operations with some Greek banks because they were not yet recapitalised, could also do more to reassure depositors by showing that abundant liquidity is on hand.
Bournemouth will send a draft set of proposals to the Football League authorities by the end of this week which it hopes will pave the way for the return of its Football League share and an exit from administration.
They include the millions of Indonesians who have been horrified by the rampant separatist and communal violence which has broken out across the vast archipelago, and which this week saw religious killings jump from the Moluccas to the tourist island of Lombok.
Of the 35 local authorities which have expressed interest in principle, the one closest to doing anything is Edinburgh, which this week started a postal referendum on introducing a two-tier scheme covering both commuters into the city and traffic in its historic centre.
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The downside risk in 2013 is to the 200-week simple moving average (SMA), which begins this week at 11, 253.14.
The ad campaign, which broke this week, marks a new beginning for TrueCar.com, which began in 2007 and grew quickly, doubling revenue every year.
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Huawei has a long-running relationship with TalkTalk in the UK. The Ascend G 330 is the latest Huawei-branded product to be launched by TalkTalk, following on the heels of Huawei's Y 201 smartphone, which launched this week, and its innovative YouView set-top box, which TalkTalk is currently installing at a rate of more than 1, 000 per day.
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The eight-week average of this ratio, which smooths out the week-to-week volatility, is an even more bullish 1.03-to-1.
We have to improve governance, a lot of which will be discussed this week at the Kabul conference, which builds off of a whole host of events around making sure that we sustain our progress in Afghanistan.
One interesting solution to this problem is being provided by Fanplayr, a new service which launched earlier this week.
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