The central bank is to focus on inflation in an upcoming quarterly policy meeting, as the public has been affected by rising prices, bank Deputy Governor Yen Tzung-ta (嚴宗大) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee in Taipei yesterday.
Yen said the bank considers three factors — economic growth, financial stabilization and inflation — when it adjusts its monetary policy.
Inflation has weighed more in the central bank’s consideration, as the consumer price index (CPI) has risen by more than 2 percent — an alert level set by the central bank — for 19 months in a row, Yen said.
Photo: CNA
Such a long period of high growth in the CPI has boosted public expectation that it is likely to continue to rise, Yen said.
Taiwan’s CPI rose by 2.74 percent over the first two months of this year compared with the same period last year, and by 2.43 percent last month alone, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said.
Inflation could rise further, as the government decided last week to raise electricity rates by an average of 11 percent starting on Saturday next week.
The power tariff hike is expected to result in an increase of 0.204 percentage points to the CPI, the DGBAS said.
The central bank has scheduled its next quarterly policy meeting for Thursday.
Market analysts have said the central bank might leave key interest rates unchanged to boost the economy at a time when Taiwan’s exports have been affected by weakening global demand.
Taiwan’s outbound shipments last month fell 17.1 percent year-on-year to US$31.05 billion, marking the sixth consecutive month of annual decline.
The central bank since March last year has raised rates by 62.5 basis points in an effort to combat inflation.
In the last policy meeting held in December last year, the central bank estimated the nation’s GDP would grow 2.53 percent this year by taking into account Taiwan’s weaker export performance.
Yen said the central bank would announce an update of its forecast after Thursday’s meeting.
Responding to the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in the US, Yen said the US Federal Reserve might slow its pace of hikes in the current rate hike cycle, which is likely to stabilize global financial markets.
The Fed is to begin a two-day policy meeting starting today.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
RSS