Japanese Minister of Finance Jun Azumi said his nation and China are committed to help resolve the European debt crisis through the IMF once eurozone members take further steps themselves.
“We shared the view that Europe needs to make more efforts to create a bigger firewall,” Azumi told reporters in Beijing on Sunday after meeting Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan (王岐山). “We also agreed to act together as the IMF will probably ask the US, Japan and China to help boost their lending capacity.”
Europe needs a bigger so-called firewall of added funding to contain the crisis, even as Greece shows some improvement in solving its woes, the Japanese finance chief said.
“Japan and China are prepared to support the IMF’s important role in addressing the European sovereign debt crisis, on the basis of further efforts by the EU and euro area members and in cooperation with G20 and IMF members,” according to a statement issued by the Japanese Ministry of Finance on Sunday after Azumi and Wang met.
China is willing to get “more deeply” involved in resolving Europe’s debt crisis and the continent must send a clearer message to show how it is working to strengthen its finances, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said at a joint press conference on Tuesday last week in Beijing with EU President Herman Van Rompuy.
US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner has thrown Washington’s support behind the new austerity measures agreed by Greece and said the US backed the idea of a new IMF loan for Athens.
“We welcome the program of economic reforms agreed to by the prime minister of Greece and the coalition parties and the public statement of support from the major economies of Europe,” Geithner said in a statement on Sunday. “This is a very strong and very difficult package of reforms, deserving of support of the international community and the IMF. The United States will encourage the IMF to support this agreement.”
The Greek parliament has approved a series of measures worth 3.2 billion euros (US$4.2 billion) in return for a second bailout deal that would write off 100 billion euros of debt and provide a loan of 130 billion euros to Greece.
Eurozone finance ministers were expected to finalize the deal in Brussels yesterday in a bid to try to save Greece — which has already been granted a 110 billion euro rescue package — from bankruptcy.
The IMF, which in May 2010 gave Greece a 30 billion euro loan as part of the first bailout, has remained silent in recent months on the idea of a new loan. Its member states are divided on whether to continue financing a country that has not respected its financial commitments.
The G20 in April 2009 decided to triple the fund’s resources as part of plans to pull the world out of recession. At that time, the US and Japan each contributed US$100 billion, the EU US$178 billion and China US$50 billion.
The EU wants G20 nations to pledge more resources to the IMF to fight the global financial crisis, according to a planning document prepared for a meeting of G20 finance chiefs and central bankers on Saturday and Sunday.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts