Greece should not lose time trying to renegotiate its international bailout, but focus instead on getting its reform program on track, European Central Bank (ECB) policymaker Joerg Asmussen said, adding that it was risky to delay adjustments.
Greece’s incoming coalition government under conservative Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has said it wants to soften the terms of the bailout, mainly by extending it by two years, to enable the country to recover from a five-year-long recession.
“The first priority for the new Greek government has to be getting the program back on track,” Asmussen, an ECB executive board member, said in a speech yesterday, adding that policy implementation had virtually stalled over the past three months.
“Delaying adjustment is risky ... And it is also not free: it requires additional funding from the creditor countries, because the country still runs a primary deficit,” Asmussen told a conference in Athens organized by The Economist magazine.
Asmussen, who has become an international negotiator for the ECB since joining the bank at the start of the year, had told a Greek newspaper at the weekend that Greece’s international lenders were willing to rework some of the program’s conditions, but not drastically.
It was key for all countries receiving financial support — Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Cyprus — to implement their programs rigorously to win back investors’ trust, Asmussen said.
“There is no silver bullet,” Asmussen said. “Those who advocate ‘once and for all solutions’ — be that a banking license for the ESM, a European transfer system, or the like — are contenting themselves with a superficial analysis.”
Asmussen spoke just ahead of a visit by auditors from the EU, IMF and ECB who will review Greece’s implementation of the reform program.
The visit of the “troika” of creditor auditors, expected to begin today though precise information is scarce, comes only days after a critical EU summit, where European leaders gave the green light for troubled banks in Spain to be recapitalized directly from the eurozone’s 500 billion euro (US$623 billion) bailout fund.
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