The US Federal Reserve is to delay raising US interest rates until next year, a Morgan Stanley index showed on Tuesday.
Greece’s struggle to stay in the eurozone along with plunging prices for Chinese stocks and commodities globally are all threatening to slow global economic growth.
The IMF reiterated its view that the Fed should wait until the first half of next year to act.
The US central bank will not increase borrowing costs until the first quarter of next year, according to the Morgan Stanley index, which is based on an analysis of futures trading.
As recently as last month, the gauge projected a shift by the end of this year.
The Fed was scheduled to issue the minutes of its June 16 and 17 meeting in Washington yesterday.
“Greece has been a headache,” Meritz Securities Co head of investment management in Seoul Park Sung-jin said.
“The timing of the Fed rate increase will be postponed. The situation helps the [US] Treasury market,” Park said.
The benchmark 10-year US yield fell five basis points to 2.21 percent as of 6:55am in London yesterday, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader data. The price of the 2.125 percent note due in May 2025 rose 14/32, or US$4.38 per US$1,000 face amount, to 99-1/4.
US government debt has returned 0.6 percent this month after tumbling almost 2 percent during the previous three months, based on the Bloomberg US Treasury Bond Index.
European leaders set a Sunday deadline for Greece to accept a rescue, saying otherwise they would take the unprecedented step of propelling the country out of the euro.
The Shanghai Composite Index plunged as much as 8.2 percent yesterday over concern that Chinese government measures to stabilize equities are failing to stem a three-week rout. The gauge has tumbled about 30 percent since a peak last month.
The Bloomberg Commodity Index fell to the lowest level since March.
Mirae Asset Global Investments Co was not ready to rule out the Fed acting this year.
The US economy is strong enough to justify an increase as soon as September’s meeting, said Will Tseng, a portfolio manager for the company in Taipei.
“The US fundamentals are still healthy enough for the Fed to tighten policy,” Tseng said.
Policymakers have kept their benchmark, the target for overnight loans between banks, in a range of zero to 0.25 percent since December 2008. The way things are going, the rate might be staying lower for longer than anyone anticipated.
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],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
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