German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she expects turbulence this year as she does “everything” to save the euro amid Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.
“The path to overcoming this won’t be without setbacks, but at the end of this path, Europe will emerge stronger from the crisis than before,” Merkel said in a New Year’s TV speech to the nation, sent in advance by e-mail.
Merkel will meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Berlin on Jan. 9 to discuss revisions to Europe’s fiscal rulebook following decisions made at a Dec. 9 summit. A final accord by euro leaders on the German-French proposals agreed at the summit is due in March.
Photo: AFP
“Today, you can trust that I will do everything to strengthen the euro,” Merkel said. “This will only succeed if Europe learns from the mistakes of the past. One of these is that a common currency can only be successful if we cooperate more than in the past in Europe.”
A crisis that began in Greece two years ago has moved to the eurozone’s core and leaders are struggling to convince investors they can contain the risk and assure the euro’s survival.
Germans are split over whether the debt crisis can be fixed, with 52 percent of voters saying that a “fundamental solution” can be found to the eurozone’s woes, according to a Forsa GmbH poll for financial consultants AWD Holding AG published on Thursday. Twenty-two percent of the respondents expect the region to abandon the euro and return to national currencies, while 90 percent said in response to a separate question that other euro member states would join Greece, Portugal and Ireland in needing aid.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble urged Germans to show more “calm” over the crisis this year, saying in a Dec. 24 interview in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that it is “manageable.”
Germany plans to speed up paying installments to Europe’s permanent bailout fund to boost market confidence in the eurozone’s resolve to beat the crisis.
The eurozone is “close to a turning point” in the crisis, Norbert Barthle, the budget spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said in an interview on Thursday, adding that Germany might not even be forced to raise its net borrowing this year to accommodate increased payments to the European Stability Mechanism owing to rising tax revenue.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to