Unable to shake off credit market angst, Wall Street turns its attention to an upcoming US Federal Reserve meeting where policymakers will attempt to restore market confidence.
Confidence was shaken again in the the past week as investment giant Bear Stearns said it had gained emergency funds from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and rival bank JPMorgan Chase to shore up its stretched finances.
Market participants said Bear Stearns' woes, triggered by mounting losses from mortgage-backed securities, and ongoing economic worries will likely spur the Fed to cut US interest rates at a policy meeting on Tuesday.
Most economists expect the US central bank to cut its key short-term federal funds interest rate, but opinion is divided over the size of a possible cut. Analysts believe it will be between 50 and 100 basis points, marking a significant reduction in borrowing costs.
The Fed has slashed its fed funds rate by 225 basis points to 3 percent since September in a bid to shore up economic momentum which is being threatened by a multiyear housing slump, a credit crunch, rising jobs cuts and skyrocketing crude oil prices.
Despite such turmoil, the stock markets mostly posted modest gains in the past week.
The leading blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.48 percent for the week ended on Friday to close at 11,951.09 points, although the index is down 10 percent for the year to date.
The NASDAQ composite finished the week unchanged at 2,212.49, while the broad-market Standard & Poor's 500 index gained 0.4 percent to 1,288.14.
"We are projecting that the FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] will vote to reduce the federal funds rate by 75 basis points on March 18. There is an outside chance of a deeper 100-basis-point cut, given turbulent conditions in financial markets," economists at Global Insight said in a briefing note.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond declined to 3.421 percent from 3.541 percent a week earlier, while that on the 30-year bond fell to 4.348 percent from 4.541 percent.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
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