The New Taiwan dollar rose substantially against its US counterpart yesterday, after the US dollar sank to its lowest level against the Japanese yen for almost a year as latest US economic data reinforced expectations that the Fed will soon stop raising lending rates.
Traders were waiting for last month's US consumer price index later yesterday for further clues on the health of the US economy.
Currency players were also due to closely monitor US Treasury Secretary John Snow's congressional testimony later yesterday on the Treasury's recent foreign exchange report.
The NT dollar rose NT$0.246 to close at 31.574 per US dollar on the Taipei foreign exchange market. The local currency opened at 31.82 per US dollar and rose to as high as 31.564 in yesterday's session.
Ivy Lee (
The US dollar fell to ?109.02 -- its lowest level since June last year -- before recovering to close at ?109.17 on the Tokyo foreign exchange market yesterday, down ?0.55 from late yesterday in New York.
The greenback also fell to 937 South Korean won from 945.6 the previous day.
"The NT dollar still has revaluation opportunities as it is believed the US dollar will continue to weaken," Lee said during a phone interview yesterday.
The NT dollar is likely to break through the NT$31 mark against the greenback in the latter half of the year, Lee said.
As Taiwan is an export-driven nation, the central bank would not sit idly by and watch the NT dollar rise rapidly hurting the competitive edge of exporters, she said.
But the monetary policymaker would not buck the trend to stop the currency from gaining when other Asian currencies are moving upward, the senior trader said.
"[The NT dollar's] advancing NT$0.3 a day should be the limit which the central bank can accept," Lee said.
The US dollar has fallen heavily over the past month amid growing concern about global economic imbalances, the prospects of a pause in US interest rate hikes and signs of forex reserve diversification by world central banks. It was mostly lower against other Asian currencies, falling to 52.075 Philippine pesos from 52.315 on Tuesday, to 37.8250 Thai baht from 38.2450, to 8,990 Indonesian rupiah from 9,315 and to S$1.5697 from 1.5822.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS