Australia’s prolonged stretch of economic growth has numbed households to the risks of budget deficits and debt, complicating efforts to adjust policy, Australian Financial System Inquiry chairman David Murray said.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has come under fire for appearing to pre-empt the results of a separate review of the taxation system by promising no changes to the treatment of residential property investments and the private-pension system.
“Running policy by ruling things out is a symptom of an economy and a community that has had [about] 25 years of continuous growth,” Murray said yesterday on Sky News.
The public “is not well-connected to arguments about debt and deficits, has not seen the serious sort of problems that can occur if those things go wrong, and the speed with which they can build up,” he added.
Abbott’s government, aiming to shore up voter support, has stepped back from budget repair — even as slowing growth and plunging commodity prices push Australia’s finances further into the red.
“It is hard to make a case to the community that things need adjustment,” Murray said. “[However,] there is absolutely no question that Australia now needs some serious policies around productivity improvement.”
The former Commonwealth Bank of Australia chief executive also urged a timely response to his review of the financial system, saying otherwise markets will try to “guess which way the government might jump.”
Murray’s report calls for Australia’s four largest banks to boost capital buffers to the top quartile of global lenders and to set aside more funds against potential mortgage losses.
Landlords have helped fuel a 40 percent surge in Sydney house prices in the past three years, and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority urged lenders in December last year to limit investor mortgage growth to 10 percent a year.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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