ARGENTINA
IMF to reopen office
The IMF on Monday said it has decided to reopen an office, six years after leaving. The decision came days after Buenos Aires reached a deal with the IMF on the money supply, interest rates and an exchange-rate framework. In exchange for these measures, the fund agreed to speed up payment of a US$50 billion loan granted in June to Latin America’s third-largest economy. IMF economist Trevor Alleyne is to be the fund’s representative in Buenos Aires. He has overseen IMF missions in countries such as Nigeria, Zambia, Jamaica, Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador.
UNITED KINGDOM
Wages rise most since 2009
Wages are growing at their fastest pace in almost a decade, suggesting that the economy is continuing to operate with little slack. Average earnings excluding bonuses rose 3.1 percent in the three months through August, the most since January 2009, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday. Unemployment held at a 43-year low of 4 percent. While wage growth remains below its pre-crisis average, muted productivity means that even a modest pickup could fuel inflation as companies raise prices to protect their margins. Bank of England officials in August raised interest rates, although Brexit uncertainty means no further increases are expected before March next year.
INDIA
Q3 home sales rise 9%
Home sales rose 9 percent across the nation’s seven biggest cities in the third quarter, boosted by low-budget apartments, Anarock Property Consultants Pvt said. The highest sales were recorded in Mumbai and Pune, which accounted for about 27 percent of purchases across the cities, the real-estate broker said in a report. The National Capital Region, which covers Delhi and surrounding areas, and Hyderabad posted the lowest growth, with a 2 percent increase from the second quarter, the data showed. The third quarter is usually a slow period for the housing market because of the 15-day shraddh period, which is considered inauspicious for buying property.
BANKING
BoA blames risk avoidance
Bank of America Corp (BoA) blames some of its investment bank’s earnings miss on avoidance of riskier loan deals as shadow banks get tougher. However, since leveraged lending traffic cops stopped handing out tickets for infringing their guidance months back, this seems like a self-imposed limit. The US administration has long been telegraphing a loosening of rules on how banks arrange and syndicate leveraged finance debt. US Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting in February said that banks could do leveraged lending however they want, as long as it does not affect their soundness. After getting that green light, many Wall Street underwriters got more aggressive in pursuit of profit.
ENERGY
Drax to buy Iberdrola plants
Drax Group PLC agreed to buy some of Iberdrola SA’s power plants for £702 million (US$926.52 million), boosting its clean energy assets. The acquisition involves pumped storage, renewable hydro and gas-fired power assets and would increase the utility’s generation capacity by more than 60 percent to about 6.6 gigawatts, CEO Will Gardiner said yesterday. Once the deal is completed it would also help boost the company’s already-growing dividend by about 8 percent, he said. Drax has already rebuilt its facility in north Yorkshire, England, to fuel four of its six coal units with biomass.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by