Traders are dialing back expectations for swings in the New Taiwan dollar as geopolitical tensions ease and investors return their focus to the global economic outlook.
Three-month implied volatility in the currency, a gauge of anticipated moves, this week slipped to the lowest since September last year.
The measure rose last month amid global banking tensions and pushed even higher at the start of this month, when President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) prepared for trip to Central America that included two stopovers in the US, following the second of which Beijing launched a series of military drills around Taiwan.
Photo: CNA
The easing in expected price swings for the NT dollar coincides with moves seen in other regional currencies.
Three-month implied volatility in the haven yen has also fallen back as the global bond market calms and traders pull trim bets on Bank of Japan policy tweaks, while the yuan equivalent has retreated amid a lack of catalysts in Chinese markets.
In other asset classes, tensions in the Taiwan Strait barely registered on investor radars, unlike the jitters caused by then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August last year.
“The fact is that there will always be some cross-strait uncertainties due to the US-China tension and also Taiwan’s own macro underperformance in particular exports,” said Stephen Chiu (趙志軒), chief Asian foreign exchange and rates strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence in Hong Kong.
“There are better Asian currencies such as the [South] Korean won to express a weaker US dollar view, keeping [New] Taiwan dollar volatility at a low level in the near term,” Chiu said.
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) yesterday announced the launch of the TSMC-UTokyo Lab to promote advanced semiconductor research, education and talent development. The lab is TSMC’s first laboratory collaboration with a university outside Taiwan, the company said in a statement. The lab would leverage “the extensive knowledge, experience, and creativity” of both institutions, the company said. It is located in the Asano Section of UTokyo’s Hongo, Tokyo, campus and would be managed by UTokyo faculty, guided by directors from UTokyo and TSMC, the company said. TSMC began working with UTokyo in 2019, resulting in 21 research projects,
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS