Countries around the world are working to diversify their supply chains and reduce their dependence on China, which is “probably good for everyone,” World Bank president David Malpass said on Tuesday.
Speaking at an event in Warsaw, Malpass said that cross-border trade would remain important to the global economy, and China — already the world’s second-largest economy and likely to become the largest — had a big role to play as both a consumer and producer of goods.
VALUE SYSTEM
Photo: AFP
However, China also needed to be part of a value system shared by other countries in the global trading system, he said, adding: “I don’t know that that will happen.”
Asked whether China was headed for a crisis due to severe COVID-19 lockdowns and debt problems in its property sector, Malpass said: “They’re having setbacks, major setbacks in various areas, and the forecasts for growth have been brought down.”
However, he said the World Bank continues to work well with China, which is a major shareholder and a borrower whose use of the lender’s financing is shrinking.
TRANSPARENCY
The bank is also working closely with China to encourage more transparency its lending to developing countries, Malpass said.
“So I guess the way I think of it is that the world needs to interact with China, recognizing that it’s important in the world and growing in importance,” Malpass said.
He also said he did not believe the world faced a new “Bretton Woods moment,” a reference to the 1944 conference that revamped the international financial architecture and created the World Bank and the IMF amid the ruins of World War II.
That system, with the US dollar at its core, “works pretty well,” he added.
“My view is we’re not at that point now at all. There’s not a sense of the world being lost,” Malpass said. “There’s this sense actually of unity of a great deal of the world in one endeavor, which is to end the war in Ukraine.”
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS