In what it called a preventative measure on Tuesday ( Feb. 4), North Korean airline Air Busan announced that it will not allow passengers to bring power banks in luggage that is stored in behind cabin bins. One of its aircraft was engulfed in flames past week, making it illegalContinue Reading
Additionally, new measures will help victims.
PUBLISHED: 4 Feb 2025 at 05: 04
According to Digital Economy and Society ( DES ) Minister Prasert Jantararuangtong, a proposed amendment to an executive order aimed at combating cybercrime and protecting its victims is expected to be published in the Royal Gazette this month.
Mr. Prasert stated on Monday that work have been intensified to combat tech murder in response to the Senate’s concerns about rising online scams and related financial harm.
Mr. Prasert claimed that the Council of State’s current review of the professional draft does provide authorities measures to combat the crime and assist victims.
Under the proposed article, banks, mobile operators, and social media owners may be held liable for injury from call center scams if they are found negligent or foolish.
Telecom providers and the NBTC ( National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission ) would also be required to suspend SIM cards that are believed to have been used by fraudsters.
The committee evaluating cash trades under the Anti-Money Laundering Act may be permitted to return stolen funds to victims without having to wait for instances to get settled in court.
Criminals could face sentences of up to five years in jail or fines of up to five million baht if they disclose private information without consent.
Regarding surrogate or animal bank accounts, the DES Ministry has been investigating the rights of SIM tickets to get abnormalities, according to Mr Prasert.
The NBTC has been given the instructions to get in touch with people who use more than 100 calls per day and who have multiple SIMs. If their proprietors don’t deliver compelling arguments, SIM cards may be suspended, he said.
By the end of December last year, Mr. Prasert claimed that as a result of the president’s assault on horse records, more than 1.6 million bank accounts had already been suspended for suspected references to fraud. He urged those who had these addresses to email their banks to get them closed, as customers are now subject to stricter customer protection laws to stop the use of proxy accounts for deceptive transactions. Additionally, those found guilty of opening accounts for scammers are subject to severe penalties.
By selling technology companies to immigrants, America has financed a current account deficit that soared to US$ 1.2 trillion in 2024. Tech stocks, however, are trading at valuations not seen since 2000, when the NASDAQ Composite began a descent that wiped out 75 % of its market capitalization by 2002.
If expectations deteriorate regarding synthetic intelligence’s ability to generate revenue, was a technology crash lead to a financing crisis for the United States? The question of the January 27 collision in AI-related stocks in response to less expensive and more effective Chinese rivals still lingers. Every capital investment in the world pays close attention to these issues.
Europeans stopped buying US debts of all kinds – Treasury, loan, and business – after the post-Covid prices of 2021 and the Federal Reserve’s subsequent rise in interest rates. That signaled the end of a 40-year bulls industry in US securities. From a 1981 peak of 15 %, the US 30-year bond yield fell in a nearly straight line to an August 2020 low of just 1.41 %.
The inflationary wave of 2021-2022 put an end to this bull work. In March 2022, moreover, the US and its allies seized half of Russia’s$ 600 billion in foreign exchange reserves, prompting other central banks to shift away from US Treasury securities to gold and other assets.
However, the world’s appetite for American tech stocks has been stagnant for the past ten years, which was rekindled by the development of Large Language Models ( LLMs) last year. Are raised valuations for AI-related shares justified? Which two aspects affect how quickly and which industries are most likely to make money from AI?
China’s DeepSeek R1 type appears to have made a model performance discovery: tale layout and related improvements reduce the amount of processing required by one or two orders of magnitude.
DeepSeek, also, offers its unit at a small fraction of the price that its US competitors then charge. That is not always detrimental to the overall US tech sector. If China has a better systems, US companies may choose it speedily, and lower costs for AI simulation does benefit the users of AI models.
US and China compete in seven distinct subcategories of AI uses. China leads most of them, and its Artificial skills are likely to strengthen it. They are
The big question is about LLM’s timing. Although the payoff might be significant, it may not be as quick as anticipated.
LLM deployment in the enterprise still has little to do with organizational performance and human adaptation ( management buy-in, workflow adjustments, etc. ). seems to be years away. Cost savings for specific categories of expenses, such as call centers or repetitive coding tasks, may be easily realized. However, the development of AI for higher-skill work is still in its infancy.
What does this mean for Nvidia’s chipmakers? On the assumption that Nvidia GPUs will provide a lot of this activity, one could argue a bullish case for Nvidia based on all of the AI sectors listed above. However, this hypothesis requires closer scrutiny of Nvidia’s competitive advantages.
Nvidia has a greater advantage in computation when training language and vision models, but less so when inference ( running the resulting models to get useful results ) is at its disposal. Notably, Huawei’s Ascend AI chips already perform fairly well with the new DeepSeek models, with comparable or even better cost performance than the weakened Nvidia H800s ( the weakened Nvidia chip that was cleared for export to China )  .
Additionally, the case that the top US tech companies ( the so-called Magnificent Seven ) will control equity returns going forward is much weaker than the market is currently perceptive of it. If we are right, and tech market valuations shrink to some significant extent, what are the macroeconomic implications? Key capital flows are more dependent on a small number of very large companies than at any other time in US history.
Let’s say foreigners reduced their purchases of tech stocks as the value of the stocks declines. The United States would need to sell more bonds to both domestic and foreign investors to pay off its current account deficit and federal budget deficit. The chart below shows the amount of new Treasury debt bought by US banks, US households, foreign official institutions, and foreign private investors, respectively.
Banks stepped in and reabsorbed the$ 4 trillion in Covid subsidies that were funded by the Treasury debt, but by 2023 they had exhausted their savings deposits. Households, who were drawn to the higher interest rates on Treasuries, saw the biggest increase in new investment in Treasury securities. Additionally, foreign private investors decreased their Treasury holdings.  ,
A full-blown financial crisis is most unlikely. The cash-burning dotcoms of 2000 have been replaced by cash-rich monopolies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta. By offering higher bond yields to domestic and international investors, the United States can adjust to an air-pocket in the demand for its tech stocks.
However, the DeepSeek shock exposes flaws in Big Tech’s core strategies as well as in the stratospheric valuation of its best-performing stocks. The outcome is likely to be a combination of persistently higher interest rates, slower growth, a decline in wealth, and strong economic headwinds.
The S&, P’s technology sector, correspondingly, trades at a P/E of 37, compared to an overall P/E for the S&, P 500 of 26. That accounts for the largest portion of the difference between the lofty valuations of American stocks and those of European, Japanese, and Chinese stocks.
A brass-tacks gauge of equity valuation is the free cash flow (FCF ) yield, namely the ratio of cash income to market price. Investors accept less current income because they anticipate higher income in the future, the higher the FCF is expected to be. For the S&, P 500 as a whole, FCF is below 3, a level not seen since the eve of the tech stock crash of 2000.
For a monopoly like Microsoft, the free cash flow yield has fallen to just 2, the lowest on record.
Between 2020 and 2024, Big Tech invested more than double in capital expenditures, and it is still investing heavily in AI-supporting data centers. The DeepSeek shock raises questions about the viability of these plans economically: If Chinese developers can create cutting-edge models using innovative model architecture designs, the raw computing power under development could be significantly overvalued.
To entice price-sensitive buyers into the Treasury market, the US government—still running a record peacetime non-recession deficit of 6 % to 7 % of GDP—probably will have to offer higher yields. That’s a problem for the economy and also a problem for the Treasury, which is already paying$ 1 trillion a year in interest, nearly quadruple the service cost of America’s national debt in 2020.
It also puts a headwind in front of the US economy for interest-sensitive activity, particularly housing. Longer-term, the US runs the risk of an Italian-style spiral, in which the rising cost of debt service eats away at the budget and limits what the federal government can do to support the economy.
Steve Hsu is professor of theoretical physics and of computational mathematics, science, and engineering at Michigan State University, and the founder of several AI startups. Follow him on X at @hsu_steve. David P. Goldman serves as Asia Times ‘ deputy editor. Follow him on X at @davidpgoldman
Gold opened in London January 31 at an all-time history of$ 2.845 an ounce. Platinum is a form of protection from political and financial disasters. More specifically, it has become a special insurance coverage against systemic risk, breaking apart from other resources it used to record – foreign assets and other metals, for instance, as well as inflation-linked Treasuries.
That may worry politicians in Washington.
Trump declared during his election plan,” I may end the war in Ukraine, I will stop the panic in the Middle East, and I will stop World War III from occurring,” adding,” You have no idea how near we are.” Trump vowed to put an end to the Ukraine War within a time of taking office, but peace is still not in view. The West didn’t accept Russia’s primary need for Ukrainian neutrality. Nevertheless, Russia continues to crush out regular gains.
What will the US would if Russia wins the military in a significant way over Ukraine? No single knows, and the price of end-of-the-world healthcare continues to rise.
Gold’s document work is distinctive in three ways.
First, gold stopped trading with other metals, including gold, copper and various professional metal. That partnership lasted from 2007 until the close of 2023. Gold has increased significantly over the past year, while another metal have not.
Next – as we have noted usually – gold traded in combination with the supply of inflation-protected US Treasuries, or TIPS. Both are types of protection against sudden inflation and serious dollar depreciation. However, after the US and its allies seize$ 300 billion of Russian foreign exchange reserves in March 2022, gold became decoupled from TIPS provides. A plan of insurance that the insurer may seize at will is less appealing than gold in a central bank vault.
Third: Different currencies used to indicate a wall against the dollar. The Japanese renminbi, an alternative to the penny, was almost tracked by the silver price. However, in 2022, this marriage ended. For one thing, Japan’s government debt is now 250 % of GDP ( twice the US figure of 120 % ), and the central bank owns more than half of that debt. Japan’s inflation has crept up, eroding consumer purchasing power and weakening the region’s political organizations. The japanese is no longer a haven for foreign currency investors. The Euro, which has the bag of fragile and depressed markets like France and Italy, is not.
The United States must sell more than a trillion dollars of assets to the rest of the world annually with a trade deficit of$ 1.2 trillion and a net international investment position of negative$ 25 trillion. Five years ago, foreign investors stopped purchasing US bill, and since then, the country has been selling tech companies to foreigners to help it balance its trade deficit. A stock market selloff may have negative effects on the US dollar.
During his confirmation hearings, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed out that the US federal deficit, which ranges between 6 % and 7 %, is unprecedented for a time without war or recession. As I wrote December 20 in Asia Times, the gap may be Trump’s rival. American businesses now have the ability to cover the majority of the US government’s gap since 2020 as a result of foreign central banks ‘ reductions in their investments of US Treasuries. However, to get interest-sensitive personal investors, it will require either lower interest rates to help banks purchases of Treasuries, which are expansionary, or higher yields on government loan.
Both the global financial picture and the geopolitical balance are becoming more dangerous. Gold’s cost run provides a disturbing measure of risk perceptions, and it has evolved into a unique hedge against both types of risk.
Up until 8 p.m. ( 1430 GMT ), more than 76 million people took a “royal dip” in the river waters on Wednesday, and three more “royal dips are scheduled before the festival ends. On Thursday, more than 9 million people took a “holy dip” at the confluence of threeContinue Reading
PUBLISHED: 30 Jan 2025 at 04: 52
Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister, pledged to dedicate himself to restoring the country’s economy, which he claims has been really mismanaged, over the next three decades.
In a speech to a group in Chiang Rai’s Phan city, Thaksin outlined the imbalance that the economy is experiencing. He assisted a Pheu Thai applicant in the Feb. 1 local election campaign for votes.
” The market has collapsed global. While people’s incomes vanish, commercial banks ‘ profits rise by 14 % against 3 % GDP growth, showing an economic imbalance caused by past mismanagement”, he said.
He claimed that the current state of the nation’s economy is much worse than it was during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when the injury was only done to the highest levels of the market.
Thaksin said his daughter, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, has her arms full running the country, but he noted that he was providing aid behind the scenes to help the president’s attempts to revive the business.
He vowed that, in keeping with his promise to do so while serving as the nation’s prime minister, he would devote himself to resolving monetary issues and restoring prosperity over the course of the next three years.
Thailand, according to Thaksin, experienced rapid economic growth and a balanced budget for two straight years, compared to the current state, which has seen years of budget shortfalls and mounting debts.
The government plans to increase agricultural product exports to China, which just agreed to purchase 300, 000 kilograms of tapioca, he said, in an effort to revive the business.
He also pledged to look for ways to raise the prices of other crops, including corn and rubber, by admonishing that there are several ways to pursue raising crop prices, especially for rubber.
BBC News, Prayagraj
BBC News, Delhi
At least 30 people have been killed in a crush at the world’s largest religious gathering, the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela in northern India, officials say.
When other pilgrims rushed to take part in a holy day of ceremony cleaning, followers on the rivers of the town of Prayagraj were trampled by additional pilgrims early on Wednesday.
Another 60 people were injured, authorities said. Most of the day was occupied by national casualty figures, which prompted opposition leaders to criticise authorities of a lack of clarity.
Those who lost loved ones expressed sympathies to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Many travelers are also looking for information about relatives and friends.
Getty ImagesAuthorities said 90 injured persons had been taken to hospitals. ” Alas, 30 of those followers have died”, senior police officer Vaibhav Krishna told a news conference on Wednesday night.
He said 25 of the deceased had been identified.
Earlier in the day, BBC investigators had witnessed scenes of conflict, with clothing, shoes, blankets and suitcases strewn on the ground as audiences tried to escape the webpage of the injury.
” People were going in every way”, one witness Ayesha Mishra told the BBC. They were “being pushed round and falling.” Babies were being suffocated by the masses.
People were seen on the ground, their injured systems, and their heads covered in mud, according to video and photos taken at the scene. As ambulances shuffled in and out of the spacious camp area for the event, some were being carried away on wheelchairs.
For days, there was uncertainty about how many people had died or were injured.
The major hospital was fenced off and reporters were prohibited from entering. Yogi Adityanath, the deputy minister of Uttar Pradesh express- where Prayagraj is located- spoke of serious accidents, but did not mention incidents.
Prime Minister Modi acknowledged there had been mortality, but he did not specify how some.
In a post on X, he wrote,” I wish for the quick recovery of all injured people,” calling the incident “extremely sad.”
News of the accident did little to discourage the huge crowds thronging the venue – more than 50 million had bathed by 14:00 local time (08:30GMT), according to government figures.
Ankit SrinivasThe Kumbh Mela happens every 12 years at Sangam, the confluence of three sacred rivers- the Ganges ( Ganga ), Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. Hindus think that taking a bath in holy water will make them sin-free and enable them to find salvation.
While the sacred bathroom is the main draw, the celebration is also a lively carnival of beliefs, where people from all walks of lives, including ascetics, politicians and celebrities, merge to enjoy.
The event, which started on January 13 and will continue until February 26, has attracted audiences from all over the country and the world. Some have come alone, individuals with their home, including children and the elderly.
Officials estimated crowds of up to 100 million people on Wednesday, making it the biggest and most significant cleaning day of the event. The Shahi snan, or imperial bath, takes a fall in the creek into the sky with thousands of ash-smeared ascetics on it.
By Tuesday night, the place was now inundated with people and a sense of jubilation filled the air. In huge and vibrant procession, glad followers sang and danced. And the following day, people were eager to take a dip.
However, the activities quickly turned into a terrifying moment.
The news of the crush first broke between 01: 00 and 02: 00 local time ( 19: 30- 20: 30 GMT ) when many ambulances were seen entering and leaving the venue.
Ankit SrinivasWhen the crowd surged toward the Sangam head, leading to the love, devotees were sleeping around the barricades there, where the rivers intersection, according to eyewitnesses, and the crowd fled.
Citizens began to run in distress, many of them injured. People had torn their clothing.
” People were trampling upon each other because the crowds were so large.” Me and my home, we all fell over”, said Poonam Singh, a follower, who came with seven friends of hers, all of whom were missing.
” I lost all my wealth, my stuff and I didn’t get my home anywhere”, she added.
The conflict was made even more so by uncertainty over what had transpired. Some followers said they had a sense that something was amiss but instead chose to continue because no one had received any assurance from the authorities.
Around 04 :00, when officials began directing people to stop going to the Sangam nose and instead take a dip at the nearest river bank, were the first announcements made.
However, that did not significantly change; by that point, the Sangam’s roads were now crowded.
Tens of thousands of people continued to travel and are still doing so, days after the incident.
EPAThe ascetics had previously promised to postpone their appearance, but eventually made it to Sangam, where their processions had been reduced.
For some travellers, the hunt for loved ones stretched through the day, and continued into the evening. Some people remained at the scene of the accident, where the victims ‘ boots, clothes, and other items were buried in the mud. Through the noise, odd cries of those who were grieving were pierced.
Anita Devi, from the northern area of Jhansi, said she had spent the entire day looking for her father.
” He needs his medications, but I have them with him.” When the love happened, I lost hold of his hands and he was gone in a blink”, she told the BBC.
” It’s been so some days but I can’t find him. I’m not sure where he might possess gone because there are so many lost-and-found centers this time. I’m making a lot of prayer for his safety and survival.
Ankit SrinivasGroup crushes are common in India, where overcrowding frequently occurs at spiritual gatherings, festivals, and open spaces. Last season, more than 120 people were killed in Hathras city, even in Uttar Pradesh, during a religious meeting.
According to officials, the Kumbh Mela’s position is now under control. However, Indian criticism officials have criticized the government for the fervor.
” Mismanagement, incompetence and government’s special focus on VIP movements instead of typical believers are responsible for this horrible incident”, Rahul Gandhi, opposition leader in parliament, said in a blog on X, calling the affair “extremely unfortunate”.
Some travelers even attributed the disaster to the authorities.
Ayesha Mishra questioned why there wasn’t a policeman presence where the incident occurred.
They were positioned toward the end of the event place, and many of us were suffocated in the middle, she said.
” We do not want to get a holy dip like this”, she added. The state may simply enjoin the public to remain at home at this point.
A distinct group of people known as Kalpwasis can be found among the large crowds at the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious meeting in Prayagraj city in northern India.
They are generally old travelers who spend a month on the banks of the holy Ganges river performing the ritual of Kalpwas. They think this will bring them closer to God and to forgiveness.
Over a million Kalpwasis are alleged to have been camping out in houses spread across the fairgrounds since the start of the Kumbh Mela on January 13 in the dark.
Two of them revealed to the BBC what their typical morning looks like.
Video by Ankit Srinivas, Antriksha Pathania and Anahita Sachdev
Banks, telecommunication, and social media companies will be held accountable for financial losses under a constitutional amendment.
PUBLISHED: 28 Jan 2025 at 14: 58
A constitutional change that will keep banks, phone companies, and social media owners accountable for losses caused by call-centre scams has been approved by the Thai authorities.
In addition to an emergency decree on measures to combat tech violence, the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society proposed the shift. The government approved it on Tuesday, said secretary Prasert Jantararuangtong.
Financial institutions, telecommunication, and social media companies would be subject to the amendment’s provisions if it was discovered that their failure to follow anti-scam laws caused economic harm to the general public, the minister said. He did not provide more details about how role may be determined.
Additionally, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission and telecommunication providers are required to suspend SIM cards that are suspected of being used by fraud. Additionally, it makes it possible for officials to gain stolen wealth to sufferers without having to wait for instances to be settled in court.
Additionally, a maximum sentence of 5 million baht and/or 5 years in prison has been increased for revealing private information without assent.
In order to stop scammers from turning stolen money into online money, the law also forbids trading online assets through peer-to-peer lending platforms.
According to Mr. Prasert,” when the amended decree comes into effect, it does help reduce technology crime and damages to the general public.”
The article would be reviewed by the Council of State, the government’s legal finger, according to government official Jirayu Huangsub, who stated that it would go into effect right away after it was published in the Royal Gazette.
The process may take no longer than 30 time, he said.
Shareholders have been betting tremendously on an AI-driven coming over the past two decades, as tech stocks have led the S&, P 500 to a 60 % get. But they also bought the “barbarous artifact” of a financial era that preceded the economy’s identity, pushing the price of silver up by almost as much. Importantly, gold outperformed other hedges by a sizable percentage against the buck.
Why wall against severe distress amid effervescent tech-driven optimism? The answer is a bit could get wrong—catastrophically wrong, in reality. The dollar-based global economic system’s core asset is then tech stocks. The United States has sold US$ 24 trillion more of its property to immigrants than Americans have sold to immigrants.
That” net international investment position” of$ 24 trillion, up from$ 18 trillion at the end of Donald Trump’s first term in office, paid for America’s cumulative trade deficit over the past 30 years. For the past 10 years, immigrants have been buying stocks rather than US Treasury bonds, as in the history.
US federal loan is now lower than it was five years ago, thanks to international central banks. If the technology bubble turns out to be a balloon, so will the US dollar. The death of the money may depend on the competition for market share for AI. If, for example, China’s open-source DeepSeek beats ChatGPT and the other British large language concepts, tech shares was tank and, with them, the money.
There are many different ways to protect against the money. Some of them are interesting. An American budget deficit of 6 % to 7 % without a war or recession, as incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Congress last week, is without precedent. But the currency’s position as a reserve money means that America has first rights on the nation’s capital.
The inflation-indexed US Treasury yields surge, partially fueled by hopes for a higher US gap under Trump, propelled the dollar higher against all major currencies. If US prices increases, so does US interest charges, and the economy’s transfer rate will rise against other currencies, even while the money loses value.
But even while all currencies sank against the dollar in response to rising “real” ( inflation-indexed ) Treasury yields, gold rose, breaking a pattern that prevailed from 2007 through 2022.
The US and its supporters seized Russian resources in March 2022, breaking the long-term connection between TIPS and metal. China, Saudi Arabia, India, and other central banks slowly shifted resources away from Treasuries into silver. On paper, TIPS and silver offer similar payments: If the money tanks and US prices increase, both assets may gain value.
The distinction is that the Treasury cannot acquire central bank vault gold in the same way it is acquire central banks holdings of its own obligations. Up to 80 basis points ( 0.8 % ) of the rise in TIPS yields during the past six months, I showed in a January 10 analysis, can be attributed to foreign central banks ‘ sales of US Treasury securities.
The hedge fund group has turned northern banks into gold. The price of real gold and the option price on the gold price are both affected by a shift in the relationship. Implied volatility is a standardized measure of the cost of metal choices, and under normal conditions, it falls as the gold rate rises.
That’s because silver mining companies have been the biggest consumers of golden choices, when the gold rate falls, they buy alternatives to lock in their revenue, and vice versa. But in 2024, something fresh happened: The cost of gold possibilities rose along with the golden value.
The gold implied volatility against price forms a” V” in the scatter chart below. That indicates that hedge funds placed wagers on a rise in silver prices.
Gold is a standout in the complex of options on macro variables ( stocks, currencies, bonds, and commodities ). While other markets are softer in terms of risk and the price of gold options ( implied volatility ) is trading at a two-year high.
Gold’s virtue is that it has a government decree-free value; it is the only form of currency that can be accepted if all else fails. It is the economic resource of last resort. With some exceptions, the bill of nearly all of the major markets has increased alarmingly in relation to economic output over the past ten years.
President Trump is walking a rope, trying to stimulate financial growth through tax breaks while juggling a document non-war, non-recession budget gap. The dangerous nature of this is heightened by Gold’s outperformance.
Observe David P Goldman on X at @davidpgoldman
