US Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday said that he sees a “less than even chance” that the US Congress would approve the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact before the next administration takes office in January.
Biden, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said that the brief “lame duck” session of US Congress after the Nov. 8 presidential election was “our only real shot” of approving the TPP.
The sweeping trade deal has been a central plank in US President Barack Obama’s foreign policy shift to counter the rising economic and military might of China, and has been broadly supported by US business interests, but it is opposed by both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, who have blamed trade deals for US job losses.
US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, has said the TPP would not get a Senate vote this year, and US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan has said he does not see enough votes for it to pass.
As prospects that the 12-nation deal could be ratified in Washington this year have dimmed, a Vietnamese lawmaker on Wednesday said that Hanoi would delay ratifying the TPP until after the US elections.
Vietnam, which stands to gain enormously from the trade deal that spans 40 percent of the world’s economy, had set a July target to approve it, according to the government’s Web site, but Dung Trung Quoc, a member of the National Assembly, said the deal would not be discussed in the next parliamentary session that opens on Oct. 20 and runs until mid-November.
“The important issue here is to find a proper time to discuss and ratify the trade deal. Everybody knows that the US is the most important member in this deal and the country is in the middle of an election,” he said.
“Therefore, Vietnam pushing back the discussion of [the] TPP is only normal,” he said, adding that the pact still has the full support of lawmakers.
Comments on the National Assembly’s Web site confirmed that the TPP ratification would be delayed.
The TPP, which excludes economic powerhouse China, must be ratified by all the participating nations.
Additional reporting by AFP
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,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
INDUSTRY LEADER: INDUSTRY LEADER: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS