Marking a moment of rare bipartisan cooperation in divided Washington, US President Barack Obama on Thursday signed into law a measure meant to create jobs by helping small firms raise capital.
Obama was joined by one of his chief antagonists in the US Congress, Republican House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor and other lawmakers, to sign the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act at the White House.
“This bill represents exactly the kind of bipartisan action we should be taking in Washington to help our economy,” Obama said at a bill signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.
“Our economy has begun to turn a corner, but we’ve still got a long way to go,” he said. “We’ve still got a lot of Americans out there who are looking for a job or looking for a job that pays better than the one that they’ve got.”
Cantor said the signing of the law was a “significant step” and added: “We can’t stop here. Republicans and Democrats need to continue working together to produce results for our nation’s small business owners and entrepreneurs.”
However, cooperation between the two parties on job creating measures in an election year has been fleeting, with the two sides deeply split on the best economic policies to create growth.
Obama’s political fortunes, as he seeks re-election, have been boosted in recent weeks by growing momentum in the economy and jobs growth, which has taken the unemployment rate down to 8.3 percent.
The latest Labor Department figures on the unemployment rate were due in yesterday.
The Silicon Valley-backed JOBS Act, was amended to include extra investor protections in crowd-funding, the increasingly common practice of using the Internet to gather a number of capital investors for a project.
With unemployment and the sluggish recovery key issues in his re-election bid, Obama earlier this year pushed for measures to aid small businesses and startup companies that create most of the new jobs in the US economy.
A provision of the act would allow small enterprises to more easily go public if they wish, by stripping out certain accounting restrictions for newly public companies.
Such “emerging growth companies” would enjoy relaxed rules under the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and while this part of the bill can be seen as a reduction of transparency, it will make running a newly public company less expensive.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts