Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis was scheduled to meet IMF managing director Christine Lagarde in Washington yesterday ahead of the country’s Thursday deadline for its next payment to the fund. Varoufakis and Lagarde were to have informal discussions on the Greek government’s reform program, according to the IMF and a Greek Ministry of Finance statement released on Saturday.
A government source told reporters that Varoufakis “will also meet with US Treasury officials” tomorrow, including US Under Secretary for International Affairs Nathan Sheets.
The meetings come amid speculation that Athens might fail to pay a 460 million euro (US$501.17 million) IMF installment if forced to choose between the IMF and paying government workers.
Greece has not received the funds remaining in its 240 billion euro EU-IMF bailout package as Brussels has demanded it first approve Greece’s revised reform plan. However, Greek Alternate Minister of Revenue Dimitris Mardas on Saturday said that Athens does have the money needed for the IMF payment.
“The payment to the IMF will take place on April 9. There is money for the payment of salaries, pensions and whatever else is needed in the next week,” he told Greek television network Mega TV.
The IMF meanwhile denied a report in German magazine Der Spiegel that it had withdrawn IMF staff temporarily in protest at the Greek government’s slowness in implementing reforms.
Greek Minister of Productive Reconstruction, the Environment and Energy Panagiotis Lafazanis, who leads the far-left wing of the SYRIZA party, accused Greece’s European partners of being annoyed at having to work with a left-wing government.
“The institutions and especially the German establishment are treating the government with doctrinal superstition and the country like a semi-colonial state,” he told the Agora newspaper. “They are not interested in the content of our proposals, but they are bothered those proposals are coming from a radical left-led government... That annoys them to the point of hysteria.”
Meanwhile, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has stepped up his courting of Russia. Tsipras, who was already scheduled to visit Russia next month for its annual Victory Day parade, is now also set to travel to Moscow on Wednesday for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tsipras has made no secret of seeking closer ties to Russia.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
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