Australia should extend its new bank levy to foreign financial institutions in a bid to recoup more than the planned A$6.2 billion (US$4.6 billion), according to cross-bench Australian Senator Nick Xenophon.
Applying the tax to foreign banks as well as the nation’s five biggest lenders might recoup as much as A$800 million, which could help fund compensation for victims of financial mismanagement and fraud, Xenophon told the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) yesterday.
He plans to consult with the opposition Labor Party to determine if it will support his position.
“I also think it’s important that the foreign-owned banks that have a big presence here in this country also be hit with this levy,” Xenophon told the ABC’s Insiders program. “The big banks are saying: ‘Well, if you are going to hit us with this, why aren’t you hitting the foreign banks?’ and I think they have a point.”
Australia plans to raise billions over the next four years by imposing a 6 basis points levy on liabilities more than A$100 billion, Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison said in the budget released on May 9.
The levy would apply to Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group, National Australia Bank Ltd and Macquarie Group Ltd, according to the Australian Department of the Treasury.
Those major banks called for foreign competitors, including ING Groep NV, HSBC Holdings PLC and Rabobank, to be netted by the new tax, according to submissions to the Treasury last week in response to the budget.
Morrison said offshore firms provided competition and the government wanted Australia’s banking system to be competitive when he was asked by reporters on Friday if he would extend the levy to foreign banks.
The levy would also allow smaller regional banks to be able to compete more effectively with their bigger rivals, Xenophon told the ABC.
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
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