Singapore’s core inflation fell to 0.7% in 2025. With price pressures receding, the MAS is expected to hold policy steady in January 2026, marking a new phase for the city-state’s economy. The late afternoon sun slants through the canopy of the Tiong Bahru Market hawker centre, glinting off stainless steel steamers and the well-worn handles…
BYD’s auditorium at Shenzhen headquarters that crystallizes the strategic pivot of the world’s largest electric vehicle maker: 1.3 million. This is BYD’s target for overseas sales in 2026, a 24.3% jump from the previous year, as announced by branding chief Li Yunfei in a January media briefing. This figure is more than a goal; it is…
Ten days into her presidency, Zou Jiayi chose Hong Kong’s Asian Financial Forum as the venue for a message that was simultaneously reassuring and urgent. Speaking on January 26 to an audience of financial heavyweights and policymakers, the new president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank emphasized that multilateral cooperation has become “an economic imperative”…
On a crisp January morning in Davos, as global elites gathered for their annual ritual of discussing “collaboration” and “shared prosperity,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech that felt less like diplomacy and more like a eulogy. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he declared, warning that great…
In the hushed private banking suites of Hong Kong and Singapore, a seismic shift is underway. Family patriarchs who built empires from rubble in the decades following China’s economic reforms now face an inescapable reality: their heirs—globally educated, digitally native, and values-driven—are preparing to inherit the largest concentration of private wealth in human history. This…
The managing director of a mid-sized Singaporean electronics manufacturer first saw the storm clouds in a curt email from a long-time partner in Ohio. “Effective next quarter,” it read, “new tariff classifications apply.” Overnight, a profitable line of specialty components was in jeopardy, a casualty of geopolitical maneuvering far from his spotless factory floor. His…
Just weeks into 2026, China’s economic data release has sent shockwaves through global financial markets and policy circles. Despite an escalating tariff war and predictions of export decline, China’s 2025 trade surplus reached an astonishing $1.2 trillion—the largest in modern economic history. This wasn’t supposed to happen. As Washington imposed punitive tariffs and Brussels contemplated…
When former Bank of England governor Mark Carney declared at Davos this week that the rules-based international order is “effectively over,” he articulated a fashionable pessimism that has become almost reflexive among global elites. Yet within hours, a chorus of finance ministers and central bankers pushed back—not with denial, but with a more textured reading…
The lights flickered in Rashid Ahmed’s textile factory in Karachi’s SITE industrial area on a sweltering October afternoon. Not from another power cut—those he’d grudgingly accepted as the cost of doing business in Pakistan—but from uncertainty. News had just broken that the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) had slashed K-Electric’s tariff by Rs7.6 per…
The death of reputational risk as a regulatory standard has unleashed something unexpected in American banking: not innovation, but a fundamental identity crisis that pits fortress-grade financial institutions against nimble, mission-driven challengers operating on thinner capital cushions. The Debanking Reckoning The numbers tell a stark story. All nine of the nation’s largest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank…
