Central bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) failed to secure a third consecutive top grade from the New York-based Global Finance magazine on Wednesday.
The magazine’s “Central Banker Report Cards 2021” gave Yang an “A-” grade, stopping a two-year streak of the top “A” grade in 2019 and last year after he took the position on Feb. 26, 2018.
The magazine said its “A” to “F grading is based on success in areas such as inflation control, economic growth goals, currency stability and interest rate management.
The magazine said that “A” represents an excellent performance, while “F” is for outright failure.
Yang was ranked on the same level as US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell this year, the report showed.
Aside from Yang and Powell, Colombia’s Leonardo Villar Gomez, Georgia’s Koba Gvenetadze, Israel’s Amir Yaron, Malaysia’s Nor Shamsiah Mohd Yunus, Mexico’s Alejandro Diaz de Leon, New Zealand’s Adrian Orr, Paraguay’s Jose Cantero Sienra, Qatar’s Abdulla Bin Saoud Al Thani and South Africa’s Lesetja Kganyago also earned an “A-.”
Ranked above those 11 were 10 other central bankers who earned the top “A” grade, Global Finance said.
They are Brazil’s Roberto Campos Neto, Bulgaria’s Dimitar Radev, Canada’s Tiff Macklem, Chile’s Mario Marcel Cullell, China’s Yi Gang (易綱), the Czech Republic’s Jiri Rusnok, Egypt’s Tarek Amer, the EU’s Christine Lagarde, Kuwait’s Mohammad Yousef Al-Hashel and Morocco’s Abdellatif Jouahr.
The Central Banker Report Cards, published every year by Global Finance since 1994, graded the central bank governors of more than 100 countries and territories this year.
“With the [COVID-19] pandemic still surging in many areas, and inflation emerging as a major area of concern once again, the world’s central bankers are confronting multiple challenges from multiple directions,” Global Finance publisher and editorial director Joseph Giarraputo said in a statement.
“Global Finance’s annual Central Banker Report Cards show which financial policy leaders are succeeding in the face of adversity and which are falling behind,” Giarraputo added.
Yang has been working at Taiwan’s central bank since 1989, serving in its foreign exchange and economic research departments before his appointment as deputy governor in 2008.
His predecessor, Perng Fai-nan (彭懷南), has the distinction of being the only central banker in the world to have earned the top grade 14 times, gaining straight A’s from 2005 to 2017.
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
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.
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