The Bank of England yesterday said it would introduce temporary measures aimed at easing liquidity pressures that arose after the UK government’s budget shocked markets.
The British central bank “announces additional measures to support market functioning,” it said in a statement, adding that it is ready to increase the size of its UK government bond purchases under an emergency measure due to end on Friday.
The bank said it is launching a Temporary Expanded Collateral Repo Facility, enabling banks to “help to ease liquidity pressures” facing client funds beyond the end of this week.
Photo: Reuters
Markets have been spooked by the recent budget announcement from the government of new British Prime Minister Liz Truss.
The unveiling of debt-fueled tax cuts aimed at supporting Britain’s recession-threatened economy sent UK bond yields soaring and the pound tumbling to a record low against the US dollar.
That triggered the emergency buying of long-dated bonds by the bank.
The central bank has so far made purchases of so-called gilts totaling around ￡5 billion (US$5.54 billion), far less than its ￡65 billion limit.
The purchases are “to restore market functioning in long-dated government bonds and reduce risks from contagion to credit conditions for UK households and businesses,” the bank said in the statement.
Fitch Ratings last week lowered the outlook on its credit rating for British government debt to negative from stable.
The pound was down slightly against the US dollar yesterday, but comfortably above the record-low level that was close to parity.
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