When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, flushed with success at his re-election, announced the nationalization of power and telephony, local and overseas investors rewarded him by wiping nearly 20 percent off the value of the Venezuelan stock market.
When the Thai military took it upon themselves to trash that country's Constitution by staging a coup, a period of relative calm ensued, only for the soldiers to declare a currency control policy that wiped 15 percent off the Thai stock market.
But let us forgive Chavez and the Thai military their megalomania, if only for this: They are not economists. They have the overriding motivation of consolidation of political power -- and to hell with those who suffer economic collateral damage.
What excuse, however, can we offer for a Taiwanese legislature that passes inept legislation undermining confidence in fiscal governance?
Yesterday the Legislative Yuan passed into law an amendment to the Deposit Insurance Act (
What this means is that the government of the day can effectively leave investors uncovered and induce a bank run on any institution it likes if there is the perception of misbehavior -- or for any other reason. How this meaningfully augments existing controls is unclear; indeed, how this can be remotely interpretable as responsible lawmaking is beyond us.
Meanwhile, the public continues to be baffled at how financial kingpins under investigation for major white-collar crime are allowed to leave the country. This is only one of a number of loopholes in a system that is struggling to complete a transition from a party-state network of back-scratching and lost paper trails to that of a modern economy with all of the requisite systems of accountability and security.
The government, however, seems to think that popular discontent can be allowed to transform into greater state intervention into legitimate financial firms. At the end of the day, it is these firms' customers who will suffer the most. The legislature should be mocked for introducing an administrative process that has the potential to destabilize much more than a target institution.
When we read of the resignation of Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman Shih Jun-ji (
The other unwelcome guest at this financial table is the politicization of financial reform. Increasing controls on institutions that behave themselves carries the potential for future manipulation of banks and other financial institutions.
One other thing is for sure: this legislative decision once again demonstrates Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou's inability to keep the morons in his party -- particularly in the legislature -- on a tight leash, still less to understand the implications of financial policymaking on the run.
And the fascinating thing about the Rebar Group fiasco -- other than the taste of blood in everyone's mouths, even if they don't know whose blood -- is that it has united pan-blue and pan-green interests in denouncing venal financiers. What a pity all of the barking has needlessly ended up biting the nation's financial credibility right where it hurts most.
The international women’s soccer match between Taiwan and New Zealand at the Kaohsiung Nanzih Football Stadium, scheduled for Tuesday last week, was canceled at the last minute amid safety concerns over poor field conditions raised by the visiting team. The Football Ferns, as New Zealand’s women’s soccer team are known, had arrived in Taiwan one week earlier to prepare and soon raised their concerns. Efforts were made to improve the field, but the replacement patches of grass could not grow fast enough. The Football Ferns canceled the closed-door training match and then days later, the main event against Team Taiwan. The safety
There are moments in history when America has turned its back on its principles and withdrawn from past commitments in service of higher goals. For example, US-Soviet Cold War competition compelled America to make a range of deals with unsavory and undemocratic figures across Latin America and Africa in service of geostrategic aims. The United States overlooked mass atrocities against the Bengali population in modern-day Bangladesh in the early 1970s in service of its tilt toward Pakistan, a relationship the Nixon administration deemed critical to its larger aims in developing relations with China. Then, of course, America switched diplomatic recognition
The National Immigration Agency on Tuesday said it had notified some naturalized citizens from China that they still had to renounce their People’s Republic of China (PRC) citizenship. They must provide proof that they have canceled their household registration in China within three months of the receipt of the notice. If they do not, the agency said it would cancel their household registration in Taiwan. Chinese are required to give up their PRC citizenship and household registration to become Republic of China (ROC) nationals, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said. He was referring to Article 9-1 of the Act
Strategic thinker Carl von Clausewitz has said that “war is politics by other means,” while investment guru Warren Buffett has said that “tariffs are an act of war.” Both aphorisms apply to China, which has long been engaged in a multifront political, economic and informational war against the US and the rest of the West. Kinetically also, China has launched the early stages of actual global conflict with its threats and aggressive moves against Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan, and its support for North Korea’s reckless actions against South Korea that could reignite the Korean War. Former US presidents Barack Obama
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