Some Wall Street banks are drawing up preliminary plans that include moving some of their London-based operations to Ireland to deal with the possibility of the UK leaving the EU, the Financial Times reported on Sunday last week, citing people familiar with the situation.
Citigroup Inc, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp are considering Ireland as an alternative location for some of their European activities if they need to move them out of the UK, according to people familiar with the banks, the Financial Times reported.
The report said that the plans were at a very early stage.
Bank of America and Morgan Stanley declined to comment on the article. Citigroup could not immediately be reached for comment outside regular working hours.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to conduct a referendum on a renegotiated EU membership if the Conservative Party is re-elected next year. This possibility has raised fears that the world’s sixth-largest economy could quit the bloc it joined in 1973.
The situation worries many in the City of London, also known as the Square Mile, the financial hub that accounts for roughly 10 percent of the British economy.
Separately, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office is looking into allegations of high street banks misusing government schemes designed to boost lending to small businesses, the report said. The UK’s main anti-fraud agency is investigating banks’ use of the government’s Enterprise Finance Guarantee and its predecessor the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme in relation to small business customers.
The report said it had seen correspondence that showed the fraud office was studying allegations about alleged abuse by lenders.
The report said the fraud office has yet to announce whether it is to launch a formal investigation.
“We are aware of the situation. We’re monitoring it, but we can neither confirm nor deny whether an investigation is or isn’t taking place,” a fraud office spokesman said.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
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