Premier Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) announcement on Thursday that First Financial Holding Co chairman Chen Yuh-chang (陳裕璋) would chair the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) after outgoing chairman Sean Chen (陳冲) was appointed vice premier caught people off guard and prompted the question, who is Chen Yuh-chang?
At a time when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) approaches his second anniversary in office, the administration has felt a need to bring fresh blood into its economic team to help the president deliver on his election promises of economic reform.
But again, who is Chen Yuh-chang?
Considered an important member of Ma’s team when he was Taipei City mayor, the 55-year-old Chen Yuh-chang has tended to keep a very low profile in both government posts and the private sector over the past three decades.
He worked at various positions at the securities and exchange commission under the Ministry of Finance between 1984 and 1992. He worked at the Fair Trade Commission from 1992 to 1996 and then at the fourth division of the Executive Yuan from 1996 to 1998, before serving as secretary-general and deputy mayor of Taipei City from 1998 to 2006. After that, he headed the EasyCard Corp, served as managing director of Mega International Commercial Bank and later chaired First Financial Holding Co.
It’s anyone’s guess who made the decision to appoint Chen Yuh-chang, but this selection means the administration hopes to press for continuity in its economic and financial policies and, most importantly, to ensure the policies’ execution.
In other words, an obvious challenge facing the new FSC head is to finalize detailed regulations for the opening of the financial services sector when this sector is included in the “early harvest” list of goods and services subject to immediate tariff concessions or exemptions under a proposed economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China.
Other than that, the new financial regulator also faces the task of consolidating the nation’s financial sector, in which inefficiency is still unsolved and the over-banking problem remains — a problem his predecessor, Sean Chen, had addressed in his inauguration on Dec. 1, 2008, but on which he made little headway during his one year and five months as FSC chairman.
In addition, creating a mechanism similar to the financial restructuring fund to prevent systematic failure, strengthening risk management of the nation’s banking sector and helping the banking sector counter the negative impact of low interest rates pose other challenges for Chen Yuh-chang.
Furthermore, the new regulator’s ability to demand discipline in some financial firms will also come under scrutiny. For instance, the question about the backers of a Hong Kong-based consortium’s bid to acquire Nan Shan Life Insurance and the boardroom fight at Waterland Financial Holdings Co regarding the company’s acquisition of MetLife Inc’s insurance business in Taiwan will mark a crucial test in the new FSC chair’s pursuit for corporate governance.
As was said before, no one should put too much faith in one man’s ability to deal with the financial problems the country is facing. Chen Yuh-chang needs the assistance of his capable peers in the commission if he is to succeed. However, as FSC Vice Chairwoman Lee Jih-chu (李紀珠) is also moving to another official post in this partial Cabinet reshuffle, an immediate challenge for Chen Yuh-chang is to make sure his new team can work well together.
Nevertheless, for a government agency like the FSC, which was initially devised to be an independent market watchdog with a four-year tenure for its chair, the continued changes at the top over the years have raised nothing but questions about policy consistency. On Monday, Chen Yuh-chang will become the seventh FSC chairman since the financial regulator was created in July 2004.
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
A recent scandal involving a high-school student from a private school in Taichung has reignited long-standing frustrations with Taiwan’s increasingly complex and high-pressure university admissions system. The student, who had successfully gained admission to several prestigious medical schools, shared their learning portfolio on social media — only for Internet sleuths to quickly uncover a falsified claim of receiving a “Best Debater” award. The fallout was swift and unforgiving. National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and Taipei Medical University revoked the student’s admission on Wednesday. One day later, Chung Shan Medical University also announced it would cancel the student’s admission. China Medical
The muting of the line “I’m from Taiwan” (我台灣來欸), sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), during a performance at the closing ceremony of the World Masters Games in New Taipei City on May 31 has sparked a public outcry. The lyric from the well-known song All Eyes on Me (世界都看見) — originally written and performed by Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) — was muted twice, while the subtitles on the screen showed an alternate line, “we come here together” (阮作伙來欸), which was not sung. The song, performed at the ceremony by a cheerleading group, was the theme
RSS