GREECE
‘Troika’ likely to return
A mission of inspectors from Greece’s international lenders will probably return to Athens today, a source close to the inspection team, also known as the “troika,” said yesterday. The troika suspended a visit in Athens earlier this month after Greece failed to meet its fiscal pledges under its EU and IMF bailout plan. Meanwhile, Greek lawmakers were expected to approve a deeply unpopular property tax yesterday to open the way for the return of international lending inspectors and the release of vital aid.
BANKING
Goldman mulls more cuts
Goldman Sachs is mulling drastic spending cuts as it braces for what could be one of its worst quarterly reports since it went public more than a decade ago, the New York Times reported yesterday. After Goldman set out this summer to cut costs by US$1.2 billion by the middle of next year, including slashing about 1,000 jobs, or 3 percent of its workforce, the Times said the firm is now considering cutting up to US$1.45 billion. It said the company is also looking at cutting employee pay and non-compensation costs such as real estate and travel.
ACCOUNTING
Deloitte faces lawsuit
A pair of lawsuits filed on Monday claim that Deloitte & Touche LLP should pay US$7.6 billion in damages for failing through years of audits to detect massive fraud at a now-defunct Florida mortgage company. “They certainly did not do their job,” said attorney Steven Thomas, who represents those suing Deloitte. “This is one of those cases where the red flags are staring you in the face and you’ve got to do a lot, and they did not.” Deloitte spokesman Jonathan Gandal said that the company rejects the claims.
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
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