Asian currencies gained this week for the first time since April on optimism stimulus measures in the world’s largest economies will support regional exports.
Policymakers in China cut their deposit rate by 25 basis points to 3.25 percent, while South Korea kept the seven-day repurchase rate unchanged at 3.25 percent on Friday. Philippine President Benigno Aquino III said he expects better growth in the coming quarters, after the Philippine economy expanded at the fastest pace since 2010 last quarter. Asian currencies pared their weekly advance after US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said fresh monetary stimulus would need further assessment.
“China has the scope to take more measures to cushion the economic slowdown,” said Sim Moh Siong, a currency strategist at Bank of Singapore Ltd (新加坡銀行). “The outlook for Asian economies is still cloudy because the global situation, especially in Europe, is still one of muddling along.”
The New Taiwan dollar slipped 0.2 percent on the week to close at NT$29.976.
Malaysia’s ringgit led with a 0.8 percent weekly advance to 3.185 versus its US counterpart. The peso gained 0.3 percent to 43.27 and South Korea’s won rose 0.2 percent to 1,175.3. The Bloomberg-JPMorgan Asia Dollar Index, which tracks the region’s 10 most-traded currencies excluding the yen, climbed 0.2 percent to 114.16 this week. The gauge declined in each of the past five weeks, the longest losing streak since 2008.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index of regional shares dropped 1.3 percent on Friday, halting a three-day advance and trimming its gain for the week to 0.1 percent, after Bernanke told US lawmakers the central bank would assess economic conditions before deciding if a third round of so-called quantitative easing is needed.
“There are still jitters on the global front and at best the US wants to keep the QE3 possibility vague for now,” said Enrico Tanuwidjaja, a Singapore-based senior currency analyst at Malayan Banking BHD.
Overseas investors sold US$550 million more shares than they bought in Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand this week, exchange data show.
“The market expects some bad data out of China and currencies of export-driven economies like Thailand will be affected,” Tanuwidjaja said.
The baht declined 0.5 percent to 31.71 per US dollar, paring a weekly advance to 0.6 percent.
Elsewhere, Indonesia’s rupiah gained 0.6 percent this week to 9,473 per US dollar, while India’s rupee climbed 0.2 percent to 55.475. The Vietnamese dong fell 0.7 percent to 21,000.
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Australian singer Kylie Minogue says “nothing compares” to performing live, but becoming an international wine magnate in under six years has been quite a thrill for the Spinning Around star. Minogue launched her first own-label wine in 2020 in partnership with celebrity drinks expert Paul Schaafsma, starting with a basic rose but quickly expanding to include sparkling, no-alcohol and premium rose offerings. The actress and singer has since wracked up sales of around 25 million bottles, with her carefully branded products pitched at low-to mid-range prices in dozens of countries. Britain, Australia and the United States are the biggest markets. “Nothing compares to performing
RSS