More than 44 percent of people expect a salary increase next year due to a booming economy, a Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控) survey showed on Monday.
However, 49.5 percent of respondents said they thought their salary would remain flat, while 6.2 percent expected a wage cut, the survey showed.
Of the respondents, 54.2 percent said they expected a year-end bonus of one to three months of their salary, 38.7 percent expected one month of salary and 7.1 percent expected more than three months of salary, it showed.
Cathay Financial attributed the upbeat outlook regarding raises and bonuses to the nation’s solid economy and an increase in corporate earnings this year.
However, the fast spread of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 weighed on the outlook regarding the economy and the willingness of respondents to make big-ticket purchases, the survey found.
Thirty-seven percent of respondents said that they expected the nation’s economy to grow further over the next six months, lower than 46 percent a month earlier, while 34 percent said they planned to increase big-ticket purchases, down from 41 percent a month earlier, the survey showed.
Given that Omicron has caused volatility in global stock markets, fewer respondents were upbeat about local equities than a month earlier, while more than half forecast that consumer prices would increase by more than 2 percent next year, the survey said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
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