Wednesday, March 29, 2023

5 things to start your day

US tech shares enter bull market. Taiwan pushes US for tax deal. AI experts want to hit pause on development. Here's what you need to know t

US tech shares enter bull market. Taiwan pushes US for tax deal. AI experts want to hit pause on development. Here's what you need to know today.

Tax Burden

Taiwanese officials are pushing the US to eliminate the burden of double taxation — as it has done for many countries — saying if Joe Biden wants to attract the world's sophisticated chipmakers, he needs to offer them a better deal. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US would try to find a way to address the "very significant problem." But doing such a deal would likely infuriate China. The case will likely be pushed further by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who just landed in the US on her way to Central America. China has warned that a mooted meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would be seen as a "provocation." 

Bull Market

Stocks in Asia were set to rise after a rally on Wall Street pushed US tech shares into a bull market, amid bets that a peak in interest rates is near and bank turmoil will continue to ease. Equity futures for benchmarks in Japan and Hong Kong advanced following a gain of 1.4% for the S&P 500 and a 1.9% jump in the Nasdaq 100, which cemented its 20% rebound from a low in December. Investors now expect US rates to sit around 4.3% by the end of the year, around 70 basis points lower than the current level.

Intelligence Gap

Artificial intelligence experts and industry leaders, including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, are calling on developers to hit the pause button on training powerful AI models, to allow for the development of shared safety protocols. More than 1,100 people in the industry signed a petition calling for a six-month break from training AI systems more powerful than the latest ChatGPT. Meanwhile, a jobs market is mushrooming around the technology for so-called "prompt engineers." For many, a computer engineering degree is optional, and what's more these newly created roles can pay upwards of $335,000 a year.

Cost of Failure

The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., facing almost $23 billion in costs from recent bank failures, is considering steering a larger-than-usual portion of that burden to the nation's biggest banks, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The agency said it plans to propose a so-called special assessment on the industry in May to shore up a $128 billion deposit insurance fund that's set to take hits after the recent collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. That would add to what already may be multibillion-dollar tabs for the likes of JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Looking Risky

Look deeper into the latest US banking crisis, and the cause may come as a surprise to anyone still thinking in terms of the crash of 2008. It wasn't dodgy loans to impecunious homebuyers that sank Silicon Valley Bank. It was a stash of what are thought to be the safest securities on Earth: US Treasuries. Of course, Uncle Sam will more than likely always be good for the cash — the problem is, with bond repayment dates stretching years into the future, what can happen to their price in the meantime. Read our Big Take for a deep dive into the cause of SVB's downfall.

What we've been reading

And finally, here's what Garfield's interested in this morning

The US economy is continuing to show the sort of resilience that throws plenty of doubt on those bets for the Federal Reserve to rapidly switch to interest-rate cuts. Even amid continuing strains on the banking system, financial conditions are rebounding rapidly toward neutral territory. The more time that passes without any fresh turmoil, the more likely it is that Wall Street becomes easy street again, as it did in the opening weeks of this year.

Such a development would back those like Fed St. Louis President James Bullard, who have been saying more rate hikes are needed because inflation is still elevated and there are sufficient other tools to deal with banking woes. Once this week's quarter-end is out of the way, that leaves plenty of scope for business surveys and then the US payrolls report on Easter Friday to bring fresh turmoil, if the latest hopes for a policy pivot are unwound the way previous ones were in February.

Garfield Reynolds is Chief Rates Correspondent for Bloomberg News in Asia, based in Sydney.

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