Archive for the ‘International Affairs’ Category
AIA Group UN-SOLD!
Written by Kelvin on June 2, 2010 – 6:41 pm -Prudential will terminate agreement to buy AIA Group!
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AIA assures Policyholders
Written by Kelvin on September 18, 2008 – 8:05 am -AIA Singapore assures Policyholders once again of its liquidity and reserves being sufficient to meet policyholder’s liabilities.
article-20080917-today-advertisment.pdf article-20080917-hbz-advertisment.pdf
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Updates on AIG
Written by Kelvin on September 17, 2008 – 1:40 pm -| Title | : | US launches AIG rescue loan to avoid market catastrophe |
| By | : | |
| Date | : | 17 September |
| URL | : | http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/376493/1/.html |
| NEW YORK: The US Federal Reserve announced Tuesday it would make an unprecedented US$85-billion rescue loan to save insurance giant American International Group (AIG) from bankruptcy amid fears of a catastrophic meltdown on financial markets.
A central bank statement said the Federal Reserve Board made the decision “with the full support of the Treasury Department” under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. “The secured loan has terms and conditions designed to protect the interests of the US government and taxpayers,” the statement said. All of AIG’s assets would be pledged to secure the loan while the Fed would retain a nearly 80-per-cent stake in the company, the Fed announced. The move came after federal officials reportedly tried but failed to persuade private firms over the weekend to put up funds to save AIG. With the vast insurance firm facing bankruptcy, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Fed President Timothy Geithner decided that a federal lifeline was needed to prevent a disastrous fall-out in the financial markets. The final decision came on Tuesday, as officials agreed it would be “catastrophic” to allow the company to fail, the Wall Street Journal reported, quoting an unnamed source familiar with the deal. Paulson and Bernanke reportedly went to Capitol Hill late Tuesday to meet with top leaders of Congress, and an influential New York senator, Charles Schumer, confirmed a historic move was in the works. “The administration is approaching an unprecedented step, but unfortunately we are living in unprecedented times,” Schumer said in a statement after meeting regulators about New York-based AIG. “Hearing of these plans, you have to stop to catch your breath. But upon reflection, the alternatives are much worse,” said the Democrat, a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Shares in AIG - a company with US$1 trillion in assets and tentacles in many markets - went on a roller-coaster ride on Tuesday, sliding 70 per cent at the open, swinging into positive territory and then closing down 21 per cent after a 60-per-cent plunge Monday. New York Governor David Paterson earlier said AIG had one day to raise up to US$80 billion to stave off bankruptcy and avoid financial calamity. In its first public statement since its shares went into a freefall on bankruptcy fears, AIG said earlier its insurance, retirement and other financial services were operating normally. AIG said its businesses “including its extensive Asian operations, continue to operate normally and remain adequately capitalised and fully capable of meeting their obligations to policyholders.” The statement added that AIG “continues to pursue alternatives to increase short-term liquidity in the parent company.” David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors, said earlier the US central bank had to act to avert a collapse at AIG that would be a calamity for markets - which went into shock after the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy Monday. “This has the appearance of a cascade or a contagion. Failure of Lehman Brothers has created contagion because of counter-party risk that was not contained by the Fed,” Kotok added. “Failure of AIG will make this much worse.” But Liz Ann Sonders, chief strategist at Charles Schwab & Co., said a Fed bailout might set a bad precedent. She said “other companies would undoubtedly look in the Fed’s direction for help.” In blow after blow late Monday, the three main rating agencies - Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch - lowered AIG’s credit score in a sign of solvency troubles for AIG. Sonders said that according to AIG regulator filings, the rating cuts are likely to trigger up to 17 billion in collateral calls. Far more than other insurers, AIG has been a big player in a complex parallel market called credit default swaps (CDS), financial instruments in which Wall Street companies take out a form of market insurance against the risks of bond default. These products, often linked to the US real estate market, are at the heart of the current banking crisis and have led to massive write-downs of assets around the world. AIG alone has written off US$25 billion amid spiking defaults on US mortgage payments in the United States. - AFP/yb |
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Bill Gates to sign off at Microsoft
Written by Kelvin on June 28, 2008 – 9:25 am -AFP - Saturday, June 28
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - - Bill Gates is spending his last day at Microsoft Friday before turning his attention full time to philanthropy after decades building the US software colossus.
The Microsoft co-founder, 52, known for his boyish face and nerdy manner, will now focus on running the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , aimed at fighting disease, reducing poverty, and improve education around the world.
Paul Allen, who teamed up with Gates to start Microsoft in a garage in 1975, will be among those “roasting” his childhood friend at a gala retirement dinner late Friday.
Gates began programming computers when he was 13 and a student living in the northwestern US state of Washington.
“Very early he demonstrated this really insatiable curiosity,” Gates’s father, William Gates Sr., said of his son in a video interview at the Microsoft website.
“He became a voracious reader. We knew he was smart, he was academically gifted, but we didn’t have any impression there was something world class going on in our living room necessarily.”
Gates and Allen were at the head of a small group of students that enjoyed working with the school’s computer, sometimes sneaking through a window to get to the machine after hours, said former teacher Bill Dougall.
School officials tapped into his programming prowess, swapping computer time for his services.
One tale is that Gates tinkered with school computer programming to put himself in classes made up mostly of girls.
Gates took his passion for knowledge to Harvard University in 1973.
“Bill was intense in college,” former college classmate Andy Braiterman said, listing academic subjects to which Gates was devoted.
“He was also very intense about pinball, Pong, Breakout (two early computer games) and most of all he was very intense about poker.”
At Harvard Gates met Steve Ballmer, who became part of Microsoft and was promoted to chief executive in 2000.
Gates recalls being in Harvard Square when Allen showed him a magazine cover story about a computer advancement, and thinking “This is happening without us and we are going to miss it.”
Gates, with the blessing of his lawyer father and teacher mom, left college after two years to start “Micro-soft” with Allen.
The duo bought the rights to existing computer software, modified it, got a copyright, and rechristened it Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS).
A key move by Gates was to focus on licensing software to computer makers in numerous “partnerships” that resulted in affordable machines being available to the masses.
In the early years at Microsoft, Gates reviewed every line of computer code and earned a reputation for not tolerating slow thinking.
Gates challenged developers with comments such as “I could write that over the weekend,” according to original Microsoft employee Steve Wood.
“He kept people on their toes,” Wood recalled. “We accomplished things that we otherwise never would have figured out we could have done.”
Microsoft’s slogan was “A computer on every desk and in every home” — using, of course, its software.
“In the mid-1980s that was still a kind of crazy thing,” said former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.
“It went in a very short time from ‘It’s insane that everyone would have a computer to ‘My God, of course everyone needs to have a computer.”
Today more than 90 percent of the world’s computers run on Microsoft software.
Gates eases into retirement ranked the third richest person in the world, behind US investor Warren Buffet and Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim.
Gates and his wife, Melinda, live in an earth-friendly “smart home” on a swath of hillside overlooking a lake near Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The couple married in Hawaii in 1994 and has three children.
While seemingly aloof, Gates has a humorous side.
There are photos of him prancing in a superhero costume at a company party, and he made a comic “Bill’s Last Day at Work” video that has gotten thousands of views on YouTube.
After leaving Microsoft, Bill Gates will remain its largest single shareholder and chairman of company’s board of directors.
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Going to China? You’ll need visa from July
Written by Kelvin on April 28, 2008 – 3:42 pm -| April 22, 2008 |
| MFA confirms new ruling for short stays; it is expected to be lifted after Olympics in August |
| By Lee Hui Chieh |
| IT IS confirmed: Singaporeans travelling to China from July 1 will need a visa - even for stays lasting 15 days or less.This requirement is expected to be lifted after the Olympic Games, which Beijing is hosting from Aug 8 to 24.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) here said that it was told of the visa requirement by the Chinese authorities yesterday. She said: ‘We have been given the assurance that the visa requirement is a temporary measure. The visa-free travel facility for trips of 15 days or less will be reinstated after the Beijing Olympics.’ However, Beijing did not specify exactly when this would happen, she added. The MFA’s statement yesterday made official the latest change to China’s visa rules, first reported in The Straits Times last Saturday. It follows a series of recent changes which have reportedly caused confusion and delays. For example, travellers going to China through Hong Kong were left stranded when the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong stopped granting them visas. The tightened rules are said to be in line with growing security concerns over the Olympics and the unrest in Tibet. Since 2003, citizens from Singapore, Brunei and Japan have been exempted from applying for visas for short stays of up to 15 days in China. The new rule, however, appears to apply only to Singapore, going by a page on the website of China’s embassy in the United States, which was updated a week ago. Neither MFA nor the Chinese embassy here could confirm this. The 2003 move was aimed at boosting tourism and business travel to China - and it seems to have done just that. The number of Singaporeans going there has been increasing: In the first 11 months of last year, Singaporeans made over 812,000 visits to China, more than 11 per cent higher than for the same period in 2006. Travel agents last night said they did not foresee tourists cancelling their trips to the mainland largely because the agents will handle visa applications for their customers. Travellers who would experience the hassle of applying personally for their visas are the minority who buy their tickets online or from the airlines, said Ms Alicia Seah, vice-president of UOB Travel Planners. Getting a China visa usually takes four working days to a week. It is not clear yet whether the new rule will result in delays in getting visas here, but travel agents seem confident they will be able to cope. Ms Ivy Tan, Chan Brothers Travel’s director of marketing communications, said her company has an entire department handling visa applications. |
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