China Financial News

Tether, the issuer of Tether (USDT), says that hedge funds that attempted to short its stablecoin after Terra’s collapse in May are using a thesis that is “incredibly misinformed” and “flat out wrong.” 

BEIJING — Chinese companies looking to raise cash overseas have turned to Switzerland — and gotten speedy regulatory approval to do so.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) announced to host the launch party of a virtual reality classroom over the Metaverse on September 1. The launch marks the commencement of HKUST’s plan to promote immersive learning by building a virtual campus in the Metaverse, to be called MetaHKUST.

The United States House of Representatives passed the Chips and Science Act on Thursday by a vote of 243 to 187. The bill, which was introduced into the Senate over a year ago, provides grants and incentives to the semiconductor industry and encourages research. It also creates a blockchain and cryptocurrency specialist position in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

With Chinese growth slowing rapidly, the biggest surprise from Thursday’s meeting of the Communist Party’s top policy-making body was what didn’t happen: No new fiscal stimulus to juice growth; no relenting from the Covid-19 lockdowns that have crushed investment and consumer spending; and no letup in a regulatory campaign that has pummeled the all-important property market.

The UK's next prime minister will take office amid turmoil: soaring inflation, a war in Ukraine, souring relations with China, a changing climate.

Most of the activity on the Bitcoin (BTC) network now happens during European and US business hours, with a notable drop in the share of activity happening during Asian hours, a new report from the crypto analytics firm Coin Metrics has found.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden held a long phone call in which the Beijing leader warned the US against meddling in China's dealings with Taiwan and splitting the world's two biggest economies, officials said.

BEIJING — U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping ended a call Thursday with plans to arrange a face-to-face meeting for the first time since Biden took office, a senior U.S. official said during a briefing.

Bitcoin's (BTC) price has been stuck in a descending channel since July 20 and it is currently heading toward the $20,000 support by the end of July. Adding to this bearish price action, BTC is down 50% year-to-date, while U.S. listed tech stocks, as measured by the Nasdaq-100 index, accumulated a 24% loss.

While domestic digital payment usage surged during the pandemic, the EIU expects this to slow over the next five years, largely owing to strong base effects. However, customers are increasingly demanding a similar revolution in cross-border payments, which are still mostly facilitated by the "old-fashioned" and "cumbersome" correspondent banking network. At the centre of this is Swift, which the paper notes has "encountered criticism for its relative inflexibility and lack of transparency" and seen a decline in the number of correspondent banking relationships over the last decade. More recently, Russian has been kicked off the Swift network, a move which could see the country and others such as China and India double down on their nascent Swift alternatives. Nevertheless, the paper says "setting up and scaling a full-fledged alternative bank-messaging system would be expensive and time consuming. It would also have limited real-world impact, given the prevalence of dollar-denominated cross-border flows. Swift will remain the dominant network, as long as countries and lenders come together to improve the Belgian network." Separately, cross-border payments will be disrupted by government-backed efforts to link systems. In Asia, moves are already underway to do this, allowing travellers across the region to purchase goods and services by scanning QR codes. As well as challenging Swift, disrupting cross-border payments will mean adopting emerging technologies, including blockchain, APIs and tokenisation, says the EIU.

Chinese leaders all but acknowledged that the country would miss its annual growth target this year, while signaling that they would stay the course on zero-tolerance Covid-prevention measures and take only cautious steps to support the struggling property market.

BEIJING — China's top leaders signaled Thursday that no big stimulus for economic growth was on the way, and downplayed the necessity of achieving the «around 5.5%» GDP target.

BEIJING — Self-driving tech start-up Pony.ai announced Thursday it plans to mass produce autonomous driving trucks in China with equipment manufacturing giant Sany Heavy Industry.

Major stablecoin issuer Tether has reiterated that the company plans to completely rid itself of commercial paper backing for its U.S.-dollar stablecoin USDT.

Subsidies and tariffs waste resources, burden taxpayers and politicize decisions best left to markets. No wonder economists extol free trade.

Western European powers have pressed Iran to sign a revived 2015 nuclear deal, warning that what's on the table now is “the best possible” arrangement. 

Croatia has opened a long-awaited bridge connecting two parts of the country's Adriatic Sea coastline while bypassing a small sliver of Bosnia's territory.

BEIJING — China's property sales are set to plunge this year by more than they did during the 2008 financial crisis, according to new estimates from S&P Global Ratings.

WASHINGTON—The International Monetary Fund lowered its outlook for global economic growth again for 2022 and 2023, as soaring inflation and the spillover from the war in Ukraine cut into household purchasing power around the world and prolonged pandemic lockdowns slowed China’s growth engine.

TikTok continues to gather a head of steam, with the popular social media application surpassing one billion users in 2022. While daily users blissfully swipe through the latest videos from their favorite content creators, data security concerns continue to ask questions of the Chinese social media behemoth.