The Swiss National Bank (SNB) can lower its deposit rate further to counter a “clearly overvalued” Swiss franc, SNB President Thomas Jordan said.
“There’s clearly a limit to the negative rate — the question is exactly where it is,” he told Swiss radio SRF in an interview broadcast on Saturday. “At the current level of minus-75 basis points, the limit surely isn’t reached.”
The SNB cut its interest rate on sight deposits on Jan. 15, when it abandoned the cap of 1.20 Swiss francs per euro it introduced in 2011. Jordan said policymakers acted in anticipation of the European Central Bank’s announcement of quantitative easing, which would have required ever larger interventions to defend the ceiling.
Since then, sight deposits — cash commercial banks hold with the central bank — have risen, a sign the SNB might have sold francs.
“We look at the foreign exchange market situation as a whole, and should there be a need, we’re active — but we can’t speak about our transactions,” Jordan said.
Asked whether Switzerland would enact a form of capital controls, he said “it’s not a measure that is at the forefront at the moment.”
With the franc having appreciated almost 16 percent against the euro, and 8 percent against the US dollar last month, Swiss economic growth is set to lose pace. The SNB’s most recent forecast, issued in December last year when the cap was still in place, was for growth of about 2 percent this year.
“At the moment, it is still hard to gauge how big the slowdown of growth will be,” he said.
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
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
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],”
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