Financial regulators must act fast to prepare for the push by US tech giants such as Facebook Inc into the financial system, European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said yesterday.
“It’s out of the question to allow them to develop in a regulatory void for their financial service activities, because it’s just too dangerous,” the former deputy director-general of the French Treasury said at annual economic conference in Aix-en-Provence, France. “We have to move more quickly than we’ve been able to do up until now.”
Facebook’s plan for a digital currency called Libra has policymakers scrambling. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has said the bank approaches it “with an open mind, but not an open door.”
The plan has also drawn fire in Washington, with more than 30 groups influential with Democrats demanding a halt to the project to deal with the “profound questions” it raises.
David Marcus, chief executive of Facebook’s blockchain subsidiary Calibra, is to testify before the US Congress this month on the initiative.
Coeure said that the development of digital currencies is exposing deficiencies in existing regulation and the failure of the banking system to adopt new technology.
“All these projects are a rather useful wake-up call for regulators and public authorities, as they encourage us to raise a number of questions and might make us improve the way we do things,” he said.
He also told reporters on the sidelines of the conference that IMF managing director Christine Lagarde is “uniquely qualified” to lead the ECB in the face of challenges from both inside and outside the eurozone, adding: “She knows how the global economy works. She knows how Europe works. And she knows how to talk to financial markets.”
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.
RSS