In response to a noticeable fall in the local currency a day earlier on the foreign exchange market, the central bank yesterday denied speculation that it had interfered in the market despite efforts to stem the inflow of hot money.
“The value of the New Taiwan dollar is decided by market forces and the central bank did not interfere to make it weaker,” central bank deputy governor George Chou (周阿定) told a legislative committee meeting.
“After talking with several foreign institutional investors, we found that the influx of speculative money had slowed down and more than NT$300 billion [US$9.51 billion] in funds remitted into Taiwan is currently deposited in local banks,” Chou said.
As to the question of whether Taiwanese companies have also been lining up to speculate on a rising local currency, he said the central bank would closely monitor the situation.
In a bid to ease a noticeable influx of hot money, the central bank has been monitoring the movement of foreign institutional investors since the beginning of the year.
The bank has named 20 of them on its “watch list.”
Central bank governor Peng Fai-nan (彭淮南) has repeatedly asked foreign institutional investors to buy Taiwanese shares or take their idle money out of Taiwan in an effort to prevent them from taking advantage of an appreciating local currency and to avoid a possible asset bubble.
The NT dollar gained ground against the US dollar in Taipei trading yesterday, rising NT$0.089 to close NT$31.450.
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) yesterday announced the launch of the TSMC-UTokyo Lab to promote advanced semiconductor research, education and talent development. The lab is TSMC’s first laboratory collaboration with a university outside Taiwan, the company said in a statement. The lab would leverage “the extensive knowledge, experience, and creativity” of both institutions, the company said. It is located in the Asano Section of UTokyo’s Hongo, Tokyo, campus and would be managed by UTokyo faculty, guided by directors from UTokyo and TSMC, the company said. TSMC began working with UTokyo in 2019, resulting in 21 research projects,
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS