Asia Pacific

Beijing responded swiftly on Tuesday to the tariffs President Trump had promised, announcing a fusillade of countermeasures targeting American companies and imports of critical products, the New York Times reported. Mr. Trump’s 10 percent tariff on all Chinese products went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, the result of an executive order issued over the weekend aimed at pressuring Beijing to crack down on fentanyl shipments into the United States.

China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle said on Monday that it is struggling to attract strategic investors amid a severe liquidity crisis, which has hampered its operations and delayed essential audits for 2024, Reuters reported. "The tough conditions under which the new energy vehicle in Mainland China is operating has certainly not facilitated this (securing a strategic investor) process," the firm said.

Turkish inflation eased again at the start of the year, offering succor to the country’s central bank as it lowers interest rates from their current heights, the Wall Street Journal reported. Consumer prices were 42% higher on year in January, easing from 44% in December, figures from Turkey’s statistics authority showed Monday. That was a little higher than expected, according to a poll of economists compiled by FactSet, but still marks the eighth straight month of easing in the country’s rate of inflation, which reached a peak of more than 75% last May.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand (SEC) is set to introduce a new trading platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that will enable securities firms to trade digital tokens, CoinMarketCap.com reported. This initiative aims to enhance the efficiency of the capital market by promoting an electronic securities ecosystem. Jomkwan Kongsakul, the deputy secretary-general of the Thai SEC, stated that the demand for token investments is increasing.

More than three years into China’s housing crisis, there is still no sign of its ending, the Wall Street Journal reported. Now, as private and locally owned developers keep faltering, the sector is becoming more state-dominated. That marks a stunning reversal for an industry that has been a poster child for China’s economic development. The latest private builder to run into a liquidity crisis is China Vanke, one of the country’s largest remaining developers. But state intervention has pulled it back from the brink of potential default, for now.

Underlying inflation in Japan is still slightly below the central bank’s target of 2%, Bank of Japan Gov. Kazuo Ueda said, underlining that it is in no hurry to raise interest rates, the Wall Street Journal reported. “Our goal is to achieve a moderate rise in prices accompanied by solid wage growth,” Ueda told a parliamentary committee on Friday.

The number of foreign workers in Japan reached a new high, underscoring the country’s growing reliance on people from overseas to address its chronic labor shortage, Bloomberg News reported. Japan had a record 2.3 million foreign workers as of October 2024, marking a 12.4% increase from the previous year, according to labor ministry figures released Friday. The number of businesses employing at least one foreign worker also hit a record high of around 342,000, up 7.3% from a year ago, the report showed.

A top executive of troubled Indian tech firm Byju’s and an ally of the company’s founder were found in contempt of court and now face financial sanctions of $25,000 a day for refusing to comply with a U.S. court order, a judge ruled yesterday. Byju’s manager Vinay Ravindra and company ally Rajendran Vellapalath failed to answer questions about their roles in stripping software, cash and other assets from Byju’s U.S. businesses that are under court supervision, a federal judge in Delaware found.