The World Bank said yesterday that China has plenty of room for further interest rate hikes as the country battles to tame inflation, but warned anxious policymakers not to overreact to rising prices.
A stronger currency would also help the world’s second-largest economy rein in food and property costs by reducing the price of imported crude oil, iron ore, grain and other commodities, the Washington-based lender said.
“There’s a lot of scope for increasing interest rates further,” Ardo Hansson, the bank’s chief economist for China, told reporters at a briefing to coincide with the launch of the latest Global Economic Prospects report.
The benefits of raising interest rates, which would help cool the red-hot property market, -outweighed the risks of attracting more speculative money from overseas, Hansson said.
After cutting rates by 200 basis points during the global crisis, China has raised its key lending and deposit rates by just 50 basis points each since October, leaving room for a “couple of increases” this year, Hansson said. However, he added that Beijing should be “prudent and careful not to overreact” when tightening monetary policy to avoid slowing the economy too quickly. Ever fearful about inflation’s potential to spark social unrest, top leaders have been pulling on a variety of levers to reduce food and property costs after inflation in November rose at the fastest pace in more than two years.
Beijing has blamed the loose monetary policy of the US for pushing down the value of the dollar and fueling a flood of liquidity into fast-growing emerging economies, such as China.
While the volume of capital flowing into East Asian developing countries surged 52 percent year-on-year last year, this was not the reason for China’s inflation problem, World Bank chief economist for East Asia Vikram Nehru told reporters during a teleconference.
Nehru said the country’s strict currency controls — which prevent the yuan from appreciating too quickly and drain money from the banking system — have been effective in stemming inflows into the economy.
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