Asia

When it comes to companies exposed to emerging markets -- most notably China -- investors should beware the lack of visibility into their books, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said Tuesday. Foreign jurisdictions aren’t maintaining adequate standards of investor protection, and the U.S. has little control over that, Clayton and other officials said in a strongly worded statement. The group also underlined a longstanding point of conflict: that the main U.S. accounting watchdog can’t inspect the work that Chinese auditors do for companies that sell stock in American markets. “In many emerging markets, including China, there is substantially greater risk that disclosures will be incomplete or misleading” and substantially less access to recourse in the event of i...

WASHINGTON — The retirement savings program for federal and military personnel is preparing to more than double the number of countries represented in its investment fund that tracks international stock markets. One of the countries to be added is China — and that's a problem for some people. Eight former senior military leaders have issued an open letter seeking to prevent the change, which is set to take effect in the second half of this year. The letter has rekindled a controversy that has flared several times since the Thrift Savings Plan first committed to broadening its international stock fund, called the I Fund. The result, the letter said, will be that a portion of money in the fund will be invested in Chinese companies including "weapons manufacturers, U.S.-sanctioned entities an...

YANGON—The Myanmar government will allow only factories that have set up preventive measure to combat COVID-19 to resume operation on April 30, according to the Ministry of Labor, Immigration and Population. On Sunday, the Ministry of Labor issued an order saying that the country’s factories would be permitted to reopen after they have set up COVID-19 preventive measures in line with the instructions of the Ministry of Health and Sports (MOHS). Factories stopped operations from April 12-19 for the Thingyan New Year public holidays and the government has currently ordered all factories to remain closed for 10 more days until April 30. The health and labor ministries say they will inspect factories to assess whether they have adopted measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. However, facto...

More accurate predictions are starting to emerge as the full impacts of the Covid-19 outbreak in Thailand start to become clearer, and we still don’t have the shops open yet. Reports from the UN’s International Labour Organisation, in collaboration with the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, have already made stark predictions about the problems that lay ahead for the Thai government, and the people working in the immediate and peripheral parts of the tourism industry. Up to 6 million people are expected to lose their jobs in the tourism sector alone as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s in a country with a total population around 66 million. Tourism is a critical industry for the Thai economy that accounts for between 15-18% of the country’s GDP in direct in...