Vietnam, where many people see gold as a safe haven against economic uncertainty, has ordered public gold-trading floors shut by March 31 because they rest on a “fragile foundation.”
The order affects about 20 gold-trading houses operated by banks and other firms, which have been running for more than two years, the state-run Vietnam News reported. Retailing of gold jewelry will still be allowed, it said.
The gold-trading floors have offered heavily leveraged trading in which investors pay a security deposit of only 7 percent of the net asset value of their trades while banks back the rest, the report said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“It’s very risky for traders involved in such highly leveraged operations,” a Hanoi-based investment analyst, Bui Kien Thanh, told Dow Jones Newswires.
The government will need to reorganize the gold-trading floors as part of efforts to stabilize domestic financial and money markets, Thanh said.
A government statement said transactions at the gold-trading firms total up to thousands of billions of dong a day, but occur “on a fragile foundation that lacks legal, economic and technical frameworks and knowledge.”
In a report early last month the World Bank said Vietnam experienced a severe shortage of foreign exchange between May and July, and again in November.
“Uncertainty regarding the level of international reserves also encouraged a precautionary demand for gold and dollars,” putting significant depreciation pressures on the exchange rate, it said.
After burning through its official US dollar reserves, Vietnam in November devalued the dong in a bid to bolster trade, which has suffered during the global financial crisis. The World Bank has said Vietnam was the world’s biggest importer of gold in 2008, when the country’s inflation reached 23 percent for the year.
On Thursday the government reported a yearly trade deficit of US$12.2 billion, down 32.1 percent year-on-year but still too high, an analyst said.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts