IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde has praised Europe’s efforts to tackle its sovereign-debt crisis and said the “breathing space” should be used to complete the repair work on the global economy.
Speaking ahead of next week’s spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, Lagarde said the policy moves taken in Europe had helped ease the strain and meant the IMF no longer needed quite so big a war chest to deal with the problems left behind by the financial crisis and recession.
“The steps taken by the Europeans in recent months are a timely reminder of the power of policy resolve and action,” Lagarde said in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Photo: Bloomberg
She urged European policymakers to “keep up and build on” their efforts, including through action in individual countries, support from the European Central Bank [ECB], repairing the banking system and fiscal integration.”
“The much-expected decision of euro area ministers to strengthen the European financial firewall has also been crucial,” she said.
Lagarde’s comments came as Italy was forced to pay sharply higher interest rates when it auctioned 5 billion euros (US$6.59 billion) worth of bonds on Thursday, underlining anxiety in financial markets about the health of the eurozone’s crisis-hit economies.
The Italian government, which is pushing through a series of unpopular economic reformsh, raised 4.88 billion euros from investors, but was forced to pay an average yield of 3.92 percent for three-year loans, far higher than the previous auction last month.
Markets were rattled by the tricky sale, although bond yields fell in afternoon trading, amid rumors that the ECB might have resumed its emergency purchases of Spanish and Italian bonds in a bid to prevent borrowing costs reaching unsustainable levels.
With Spain still in the markets’ sights too, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy repeated his insistence that his country would not need financial aid.
“Nobody is considering a bailout, it is on nobody’s agenda,” he told a press conference in Poland, where he was on an official visit.
He also said he had spoken with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, who had denied blaming Spain’s travails for rocketing Italian bond yields. Meanwhile, unemployment in Greece rose to 21.8 percent, up from 12.5 percent two years ago.
Soros Fund Management chairman George Soros said that Europe’s “deflationary debt trap threatens to destroy a still incomplete political union.”
In an article in the Financial Times, Soros said the euro had entered a “more lethal phase” and outlined a series of measures to solve the crisis — including an idea that all countries should be able to refinance their debt at the same interest rate.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS