US President Donald Trump was yesterday to sign an executive order directing US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin to review any significant tax regulations from last year, especially those that might burden Americans.
The US president was also to sign memos related to the designation process of systemically important banks and to orderly liquidation authority.
Trump was to visit the US Department of the Treasury to sign the order, which is aimed at identifying and reducing regulatory burdens that “add undue complexity” and “exceed statutory authority,” the White House said in a statement.
Under former US president Barack Obama, the US Treasury sought to rein in US companies’ attempts to shift their profit offshore by proposing rules that would curb so-called “earnings stripping” and inversions — mergers in which US companies transfer their tax address overseas to low-tax countries like Ireland to cut their tax bills.
Some of those rules, first proposed in April last year, sought to restrict lending among subsidiaries of the same corporate parent, a technique that can create income in low-tax countries and tax-deductible interest payments in the US.
The proposed rules met a barrage of criticism from corporations and tax lawyers, who complained that they went too far by banning common, everyday cash-management practices that have nothing to do with tax avoidance.
Amid the criticism, the US Treasury in October last year softened the proposed rules to allow cash pooling, a common corporate money-management technique in which excess cash in subsidiaries is swept daily into a single pool.
It also delayed until Jan. 1 next year a related proposal that would require companies to extensively document their related-party lending.
One of the memos Trump were to sign would require a review of the Financial Stability Oversight Committee’s designation process for systemically important banks — and risks created by such designations.
The other would review orderly liquidation authority, with a report due to the US president within 180 days, and examine whether enhanced bankruptcy authority is a better alternative for failing financial companies.
It would also look at the adverse impact of failing financial firms and whether availability of bankruptcy authority could lead to excessive risk-taking.
Trump in February signed an executive order instructing regulators to examine financial rules and file a report on their findings, starting what the administration has promised will be a broad overhaul.
The US House of Representatives earlier this month approved legislation to create a new bankruptcy process for financial companies with more than US$50 billion in assets that could allow for a quick transfer of a failed bank’s assets and impose a temporary stay of some contractual rights to give the company time to restructure.
The measure aims to address concerns that led lawmakers to approve taxpayer bailouts during the 2008 credit crisis. At the time, the structures of Wall Street banks were considered too complex to go through bankruptcy court.
The 2010 financial regulation law known as Dodd-Frank established a so-called orderly liquidation authority under which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp is empowered to untangle and wind down the biggest banks.
Republican lawmakers have said the law does not address the fact that Wall Street firms remain too big to fail, meaning taxpayers will still be on the hook for rescues.
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],”
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
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