Markets expect a near-certain September rate rise to a 31-year high, spurring talk of faster hikes toward 1.5%. Yet the BOJ has shown a hike-then-hold pattern, pausing in July to "assess the impact" before acting again. The yen has already jumped roughly 4.5% pre-meeting, easing one of the three tightening triggers the BOJ cites—alongside oil prices and AI-driven demand. With that pressure valve open and parliament convening in October, a pause is more likely than another hike before January 2027.
New Delhi joined the US-led coalition this week to shape next-generation wireless infrastructure and lock Chinese vendors out of future tenders, but this follows a familiar pattern from India's other flagship US-anchored groupings. A parallel US-led grouping that India belongs to, the Quad, touted a $20 billion capital mobilisation target for its 2026 critical minerals framework, yet attached no binding commitments or project timelines to it. Expect this 6G pact to follow the same declaratory-to-dormant arc.
The duties originate from a complaint lodged by Chinese chemicals manufacturer Tangshan Sunfar, yet Sunfar's own 2025 annual report admits domestic semiconductor-grade dichlorosilane output remains scarce, with capacity geared towards lower-grade industrial variants for solar polysilicon. With Japanese supply priced out, established South Korean and European gas makers, not untested Chinese rivals, are best placed to fill the gap, entrenching China's foreign supply chain dependence rather than delivering import substitution.
The Korean industry minister pressed his French counterpart on the sidelines of a Lee-Macron meeting to fix the scheme so Korean-made EVs are not penalised. Yet France's bonus écologique scores vehicles on lifecycle carbon footprint, including maritime shipping distance, which structurally disadvantages cars built in Korea versus those made in Europe. With French carmakers still lobbying to keep that formula intact, any relief for Hyundai or Kia is likelier to arrive model-by-model, tied to battery-sourcing or local-investment pledges, rather than as a wholesale rewrite.
Linking civil registration data to payment rails for state welfare payments sound seamless to Jakarta, yet comparable digital welfare rollouts elsewhere in Asia have stumbled on incomplete rural identity records and patchy connectivity, meaning the drive will only boost deposit headlines on paper rather than replacing village-level cash intermediaries.
From that date, importers need pre-shipment halal certification before customs clears a widened list of goods including cosmetics and supplements. Over 700,000 of 1.35 million promised free certificates remain unprocessed months out, and certification takes three to six months, a backlog Jakarta will likely handle the way it already has for US exporters: informally, not by publicly delaying the deadline.
Bangkok halted all new and pending data centre approvals on 4 September, ordering four subcommittees to draft national standards on water, power, siting and safety within thirty days. Coordinating five separate agencies, plus resistance from developers already mid-build, makes that timeline unrealistic, and the pause will drag on far longer than officials are currently admitting.
Beijing's newly drafted Insurance Law introduces sweeping look-through supervision requiring shareholders and ultimate controllers to prove clean, well-funded capital sources, alongside new powers letting regulators force capital injections, freeze dividends or compel a change of control. Insurers whose owners cannot meet these transparency and funding tests, often smaller regional carriers with murky related-party ownership, will be the ones pushed into consolidation, not through an automatic capital deadline but through this tightened vetting and enforcement regime.
Tokyo's plan to let JOGMEC buy critical mineral stakes alone, without waiting for a private Japanese co-investor, is meant to help the state act fast when firms hesitate over political risk. But that same risk-aversion will shape which assets bureaucrats greenlight first, making the policy slow to meaningfully displace China's grip on the hardest-to-reach, highest-value deposits.
Seoul is merging five state power generators into a single entity partly to unlock the scale needed to build grid and renewable capacity faster for the chip cluster. But the merger itself is likely to consume management bandwidth on headquarters-siting disputes among the five current host cities, labour union consultations, and integration costs well before it delivers any extra transmission capacity, so the promised acceleration will arrive too late for the fabs that need it most.
China's new five-year plan on SME development explicitly deepens the "specialised and sophisticated" board on regional equity markets, backs a listing-cultivation database and channels a second phase of the National SME Development Fund toward pre-IPO hard-tech firms. With state financing and administrative machinery now aimed squarely at pushing this specific cohort toward public markets, expect a visible acceleration in listings at Beijing's niche-tech-facing exchange well before the plan's 2030 horizon.
That break, covering housing allowances, children's international school fees and language training for all qualifying expats in China, has been renewed twice before, in 2021 and 2023. With the withdrawal of a 30-year dividend tax exemption for foreign individuals, Beijing clearly signals that it is done treating foreign nationals as a protected tax category, making a third renewal of the far costlier fringe-benefit break look increasingly unlikely.