Amid growing calls for better financial supervision, two panelists yesterday advised caution in tightening regulations after a financial crisis, saying it could suffocate innovation.
“This crisis should not be used as an excuse to tighten regulation at the cost of financial innovation,” Kuan Chung-ming (管中閩), a member of Academia Sinica, told a panel discussion in Taipei, which included visiting Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) chairman Morris Chang (張忠謀) and Allianz Global Investors global CEO Udo Frank.
Frank said the financial crisis triggered by subprime loans highlighted the importance of ensuring financial transparency and that investors fully understood the risks they were taking with their investments.
At the same time, financial regulation should be forward-looking, Frank said, and no government should be expected to run banks or businesses — at the risk of lowered productivity — even though they have pumped money to bail out companies and save the economy.
Krugman said financial innovation has become “a slogan,” but few seem to understand what it involves.
While some see financial services such as ATMs or credit cards as financial innovation, recent concern over financial innovation involves more sophisticated products such as derivatives and swaps.
In contrast to Krugman’s pessimistic view of the global economic outlook in the next 10 years, Frank said his company expected Asia to recover ahead of the US, which could show positive growth in the fourth quarter of this year, followed by a rebound in the Europe.
He also warned of a short-term concern — the specter of inflation after governments worldwide pumped massive capital into the markets.
Still, Frank agreed with Krugman that technology would help the world recover and attract new investments, favoring environment-friendly and green-related industries as investment targets.
“Find growth in the new way, rather than in the old way,” he told the seminar.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained