Asian currencies dipped this past week on concern Europe’s sovereign debt crisis and a faltering US economic recovery would hurt exports and deter investment in emerging markets.
Overseas investors pulled US$1.85 billion from shares in Taiwan and South Korea over the week, exchange data show.
Greece will default on its debt and Portugal and Ireland are likely to suffer the same fate, Martin Feldstein, former president of the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research, said on Thursday.
Data this week showed US consumers are the least confident in more than two years and retail sales in the world’s biggest economy stagnated last month.
“There’s negative sentiment from what’s happening in the euro zone and the US,” said Ho Woei Chen, a Singapore-based economist at United Overseas Bank. “Concern about government debt in the eurozone will continue to crop up.”
The New Taiwan dollar lost 0.4 percent this week to NT$28.897 per US dollar in Taipei, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
The NT dollar retreated for a second week as global funds net sold US$1.2 billion in local stocks.
“Investors are still concerned recoveries in the US and Europe are not going well,” said Eric Hsing, a fixed-income trader at First Securities Inc (第一金證券) in Taipei. “Foreign funds have sold a lot of stocks recently, dragging down the Taiwan dollar.”
The Philippine peso slid 0.45 percent to 42.938 per US dollar this week. It fell for the first week in four after exports unexpectedly dipped in May. Exports fell 3.2 percent from a year earlier, compared with the median forecast for a 4.3 percent gain in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
The Bank of Korea on Friday lowered its economic growth forecast for this year to 4.3 percent, from its forecast of 4.5 percent made in April, on an expected slowdown in domestic demand. The won lost 0.1 percent over the week to close at 1,057.95 per US dollar.
Elsewhere, the Indian rupee fell 0.4 percent to 44.52 against the greenback, while the Malaysian ringgit weakened 0.5 percent to 3.0063 and the Indonesian rupiah retreated 0.3 percent to 8,544.
The Singaporean dollar and the Chinese yuan were little changed at S$1.2192 and 6.4650 respectively. The Thai bath strengthened 0.5 percent.
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