German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble has defended the European Commission’s (EC) decision to give France two more years to meet the EU’s deficit target of 3 percent.
In an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper, set to appear in yesterday’s edition, Schaeuble said the EU’s growth and stability pact “allows a certain flexibility in applying the rules.”
He added though that “the Commission and the [German] government are in complete agreement that there must not be any relaxing of [economic] reforms.”
The EC offered France extra time after its spring forecasts painted a pessimistic picture of the French economy over the next two years, with its deficit set to rise sharply.
For its part France on Saturday said even with a two-year extension it would not relax efforts to reduce public debt.
“There is no question of easing the effort to reduce spending,” French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici told reporters.
However, in Berlin some members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition were not in favor of Brussels’ decision.
“It is a bad sign. I don’t see that France is engaged in reforms. Giving more time [to France] is the same as saying, ‘continue like that,’” Michael Stuebgen, head of European issues in the conservative parliamentary group, told the German weekly Focus.
German Minister of Economics Philipp Roesler, called European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso “irresponsible” in his handling of Europe’s budgetary policy.
“It’s irresponsible when a European Commission president puts in question the policy of budgetary consolidation in the EU countries,” Roesler said.
In order to fight the debt crisis, “we must boost growth, and consolidate the budgets. We have to make cuts,” Roesler said, adding that Germany has set “a good example ... We don’t spend more, but less.”
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