US President Donald Trump’s administration has issued a partial — and qualified — denial to the revelation that it is discussing imposing limits on US investments in Chinese companies and financial markets as China vowed to continue opening its markets to foreign investment.
Bloomberg News on Friday reported that US National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow was leading deliberations inside the White House over what some hawks have labeled a potential “financial decoupling” of the world’s two largest economies.
The options discussed have included forcing a delisting of Chinese firms from US exchanges, imposing limits on investments in Chinese markets by US government pension funds and putting caps on the value of Chinese companies included in indexes managed by US firms, according to people familiar with and involved in the discussions.
In a statement e-mailed to Bloomberg on Saturday, a spokeswoman for US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said there were no current plans to stop Chinese companies from listing on US exchanges.
“The administration is not contemplating blocking Chinese companies from listing shares on US stock exchanges at this time,” US Department of the Treasury spokeswoman Monica Crowley said.
Crowley did not address any of the other options reported and declined to offer any further details of the discussions.
People close to the White House deliberations say they remain preliminary and that no final course of action has been decided on.
They also insist the focus is on protecting US investors from ending up unwittingly with stakes in Chinese companies that do not have the same auditing standards as US listed firms.
At a briefing yesterday in Beijing, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Geng Shuang (耿爽) said China-US trade and financial cooperation is mutually beneficial.
“Maximum pressure and forced decoupling will surely harm the interests of our enterprises and people, cause instability in financial markets, as well as threaten international trade and global economic growth,” Geng said. “This does not accord with the interests of the international community.”
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
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
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],”
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