The International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday that the global economy faces serious risks from Big Tech firms taking on massive debt to fund the buildout of artificial intelligence data centers worldwide. The IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report outlines a number of risks to economic growth in the coming years, including a reliance on AI […]

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Southeast Asia’s growth next year will be decided at meetings its finance ministers won’t attend. A few executives in California will soon settle next year’s spending on data centers. Their decisions will do more to shape growth in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines than any budget those governments pass. The World Bank has just […]

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Paul Krugman is the greatest econ writer in the world, and also a legendary economist. But I sometimes feel that he has a blind spot when it comes to the value of new technologies. In 1998 he famously wrote: The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that […]

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TOKYO – China gave global investors one of 2026’s biggest AI thrills. Yet the country that helped ignite excitement about artificial intelligence is home to one of the worst-performing major stock markets. While AI fever has propelled Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo higher, Chinese shares are stuck in reverse.

So what gives? Several forces, actually. Weak household demand, for one. Consumer spending continues to disappoint, weighing on the earnings potential of mainland internet companies, automakers, and retailers.

The post Why China is missing the big AI rally appeared first on Asia Times.

The global bond markets are a sensitive lot. And they’ve been having a particularly tricky time lately. Spooked by high inflation, high interest rates and high levels of government debt across the world, those markets have become less stable over the summer. The prices of government bonds – what governments sell to investors – have gone down. […]

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