Top Analyst at China’s Citic Securities Under Investigation; Suspected of Leaking Inside Information

Top Analyst at China’s Citic Securities Under Investigation

Suspected of Leaking Inside Information

SHEN HONG

June 20, 2014 6:19 a.m. ET

SHANGHAI—China’s securities regulator is investigating a star analyst at the country’s largest stock brokerage for allegedly leaking inside information, intensifying a campaign to strengthen oversight of a market notorious for irregularities and lax risk controls. Read more of this post

Taiwan’s Night Markets Go Global

Jun 20, 2014

Taiwan’s Night Markets Go Global

Taiwan has long been known for its night markets.

According to the island’s tourism bureau, night markets attract more than 70% of foreign visitors. The popularity of these nightly bazaars even prompted the bureau to come up with an app in which players can be virtual street hawkers in the markets.

But as Taiwan becomes more globalized, so too has the selection at the night markets. Read more of this post

Alone at last: Europe’s biggest stock-exchange group becomes independent

Alone at last: Europe’s biggest stock-exchange group becomes independent

Jun 21st 2014 | PARIS | From the print edition

IT LOOKED an ambitious project when the bourses of Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels joined forces in 2000 to create a pan-European union of stock exchanges. They then acquired the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) and Portugal’s Bolsa de Valores. After seven years of independence, Euronext disappeared into the maw of the New York Stock Exchange, which in turn was bought by IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) in November 2013. ICE has now spat out Euronext, minus LIFFE and its derivatives business. Defining its new role is almost as big a challenge as Euronext faced in the heroic days of its founding. Read more of this post

Yuawn: Buzz about the rise of China’s currency has run far ahead of sedate reality

Yuawn: Buzz about the rise of China’s currency has run far ahead of sedate reality

Jun 21st 2014 | HONG KONG | From the print edition

IF HEADLINES translated into trading volumes, the yuan would be well on its way to dominating the world’s currency markets. It once again graced front pages this week after moves to lift its status in London, the world’s biggest foreign-exchange market. This was the latest instalment of a five-year-long public-relations campaign. Since 2009, when China first declared its intention to promote the yuan internationally, a string of announcements and milestones has cast the Chinese currency as a putative rival to the dollar. Read more of this post

Counting the cost of finance: A new paper shows the industry’s take has been rising

Counting the cost of finance: A new paper shows the industry’s take has been rising

Jun 21st 2014 | From the print edition

EVERYBODY knows that the collapse of the financial system in 2008 was hugely costly for Western economies. But finance was taking a heavier toll on the economy even before Lehman Brothers went under. Read more of this post

Monetary policy and asset prices: A narrow path; Central banks around the world are struggling to promote growth without fomenting worrisome risk-taking

Monetary policy and asset prices: A narrow path; Central banks around the world are struggling to promote growth without fomenting worrisome risk-taking

Jun 21st 2014 | Washington, DC | From the print edition

UNTIL the global financial crisis, central banks treated bubbles with benign neglect: they were hard to detect and harder to deflate, so best left alone; the mess could be mopped up after they burst. No self-respecting central bank admits to benign neglect any longer. “No one wants to live through another financial crisis,” Janet Yellen, then a candidate to head the Federal Reserve, said last year. “I would not rule out using monetary policy as a tool to address asset-price misalignments.”

Read more of this post

Hon Hai suffers setback in establishing retail chains

Hon Hai suffers setback in establishing retail chains

Staff Reporter

2014-06-19

Pan International Electronics, a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry (also known as Foxconn), has already dumped its 48% stake in consumer electronics retail chain Cybermart, according to Shanghai’s China Business News, citing Taiwanese media reports. Read more of this post

Wang Xisha, daughter of Chinese vice premier Wang Yang; The couple’s extravagant lifestyle has frequently caught the attention of Hong Kong’s paparazzi and tabloids

Wang Xisha, daughter of Chinese vice premier Wang Yang

Staff Reporter

2014-06-19

Wang Xisha and husband Nicholas Zhang photographed in Hong Kong in mid-2013. Wang is believed to have given birth to the couple’s first child around the end of last year. (Internet photo) Read more of this post

China’s SAFE is biggest public sector holder of equities

China’s SAFE is biggest public sector holder of equities

Staff Reporter

2014-06-19

Central banks worldwide have become major players in global equity markets, with a recent report showing that China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) is the largest public sector holder of equities, according to Shanghai’s China Business News. Read more of this post

Only 13 Taiwanese universities among Asia’s top 100

Only 13 Taiwanese universities among Asia’s top 100

CNA

2014-06-20

Thirteen universities from Taiwan have been listed among the top 100 in the Asia University Rankings released Wednesday by the Times Higher Education magazine, with National Taiwan University ranked highest at 14th.

Compared with last year, when 17 Taiwan universities made the list, the latest results represent a decline. Read more of this post

Korea is the current world champion of R&D spending

Korea is the current world champion of R&D spending

By Matt Phillips @MatthewPhillips June 19, 2014

South Korea punches far above its weight when it comes to spending on innovation. In 2012, Korea spent 4.4% of GDP on research and development. That’s the highest among the developed nations tracked by OECD, the Paris-based rich nation think tank. The private sector is a key driver. Private-sector R&D spending is up 35% between 2008 and 2011, and has more than doubled since 2003.

The surge has pushed Korean patents up 32% since 2008. And South Korea’s share of global patent production was up to 5.7% in 2011, the last year of available data. (It was 2.3% of global in 2003.) There’s a fairly simple reason for Korea’s hypertrophied business R&D: Although much of this growth has been in the private sector, it’s heavily government-subsidized. Read more of this post

India’s thirst for whiskey may finally be waning

India’s thirst for whiskey may finally be waning

By Devjyot Ghoshal @DevjyotGhoshal an hour ago

Sometime in the last decade, Indians started consuming whiskey with such gusto that the subcontinent became the world’s biggest market for the spirit, in terms of volume.

Between 2007 and 2012, the country’s whiskey appetite doubled to over 1.4 billion litres, as everything from imported smoky single malts to throat-searing local varieties was swiftly knocked back. It seemed a thirst that couldn’t be quenched. Read more of this post