Federal Reserve policymakers have targeted a “soft landing” for the US economy since beginning their effort a year ago to tame runaway inflation by hiking interest rates. That is, they believed they could do so without sending the US into recession. But the Fed’s decision to raise rates by a quarter point on March 22, […]Continue Reading
Protectionist trade policies and the lack of an economic agenda for East and Southeast Asia have become central themes in critiques of US policy towards the region and its approach to managing US-China “strategic competition.” According to these accounts, US protectionism undermines its economic draw in East Asia — and the political leverage stemming from it — at a time when it has […]Continue Reading
The Federal Reserve faces a pivotal decision on March 22, 2023: whether to continue its aggressive fight against inflation or put it on hold. Making another big interest rate hike would risk exacerbating the global banking turmoil sparked by Silicon Valley Bank’s failure on March 10. Raising rates too little, or not at all as […]Continue Reading
TOKYO – NTT and KDDI, Japan’s top two telecom carriers, will cooperate in developing new telecom technology that aims for a 125-times increase in transmission capacity, a 100-times increase in energy efficiency and a 200-times reduction in end-to-end delay (latency) for mobile and optical networks. If successful, they could potentially set the global standard for […]Continue Reading
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, is considered an ambitious long-term strategy to promote the expansion of Chinese influence by providing countries in the region with aid and infrastructure investment. But in contrast with some Southeast Asian states which have largely embraced the BRI with open arms, Vietnam has […]Continue Reading
US regulators’ swift reaction to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and two other lenders partially restored calm to markets, but concerns remain over the stability of the global financial system. The government is racing to orchestrate a US$30 billion rescue of First Republic Bank by the nation’s largest financial institutions after the California lender’s […]Continue Reading
The Federal Reserve is facing a rather sticky problem. Despite its best efforts over the past year, inflation is stubbornly refusing to head south with any urgency to a target of 2%. Rather, the inflation report released on March 14, 2023, shows consumer prices rose 0.4% in February, meaning the year-over-year increase is now at […]Continue Reading
Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed with enormous speed – so quickly that they could be textbook cases of classic bank runs, in which too many depositors withdraw their funds from a bank at the same time. The failures at SVB and Signature were two of the three biggest in US banking history, following […]Continue Reading
In February 2023, India’s government announced that the Geological Survey of India found around 5.9 million tonnes of lithium reserves in the Salal-Haimana region of Jammu and Kashmir. Lithium is sometimes termed “white gold” for its strategic importance as an essential metal in electrification. But India faces several challenges in capitalizing on its lithium deposits. […]Continue Reading
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed Japan to reevaluate its energy strategy once again. A sharp rise in the price of LNG, a lack of energy alternatives to reduce reliance on Russian LNG imports and Tokyo’s commitment to phasing out Russian coal and oil imports — all while ensuring Japan’s energy security — are making this reevaluation […]Continue Reading