Hong Kong plans to provide an incentive to residents to discourage them from using a HK$36 billion (US$4.6 billion) budget cash handout, amid concern that the pace of inflation may reach a 14-year high.
Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang (曾俊華) last week -abandoned a budget plan to inject HK$24 billion into pension fund accounts, caving into demands from lawmakers, and said he would instead hand out HK$6,000 each to residents.
“Recipients will be able to draw on this cash as they wish,” Tsang said in a speech broadcast by the Radio Television Hong Kong yesterday. “There will also be an incentive, perhaps in the form of an interest payment, to encourage people not to immediately withdraw the money.”
Inflation in the territory may reach 4.5 percent this year, the fastest gain since 1997, Tsang forecast on Feb. 24, as rising -commodity costs, low interest rates and capital flows from developed economies stoke prices. The government abandoned its initial budget plan after a University of Hong Kong poll showed Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s (曾蔭權) popularity fell.
The government will give details of the cash handout “as soon as possible,” the financial secretary said yesterday.
Inflation is accelerating in Asia from Singapore to Vietnam, spurring governments to raise interest rates and let currencies appreciate. China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam all increased borrowing costs this year, widening the gap with the US Federal Reserve’s near-zero benchmark rate.
The financial secretary said on Feb. 23, when he announced the original budget, that battling inflation and getting ahead of a property bubble were his government’s main tasks this year.
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],”
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
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