China’s new lending rose to 548.5 billion yuan (US$85.9 billion) last month and money supply growth expanded at the slowest pace in at least six years.
New local-currency lending compared with the 500 billion yuan median estimate in a Bloomberg News Survey of 26 economists and 492.6 billion yuan in July. M2, the broadest measure of money supply, rose 13.5 percent, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on its Web site yesterday.
That compared with the 14.2 percent median estimate in the survey and a 14.7 percent gain in July, the slowest pace since at least January 2005, Bloomberg data showed.
Beijing may pause on monetary policy tightening as its economy moderates amid Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s (溫家寶) campaign to cool inflation and the property -market, and as the outlook for global growth weakens.
China faces a “very complicated, unstable and uncertain environment both at home and abroad,” Wen said last week.
“There should be no more interest rate hikes this year given the slowing domestic economy, easing inflation and deteriorating external growth outlook,” Chang Jian (常建), an economist at Barclays Capital in Hong Kong, who formerly worked for the World Bank, said before the release. “Yet some selective or targeted easing is expected in the months ahead.”
The central bank started last Monday to widen its reserve requirements to include lenders’ margin deposits, a move that will be phased in over the next six months and is estimated by some banks to withdraw 900 billion yuan from the bank system.
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
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