Everything to Know About Nuclear Fuel Uranium

Political

Summary:

Eastern Libyan forces said on Thursday that 10 drums of uranium declared missing by the U.N. nuclear watchdog had been found near the warehouse they were taken from in southern Libya.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Wednesday its inspectors found out about the missing uranium after carrying out an inspection originally planned for last year that "had to be postponed because of the security situation in the region".

Here is everything you need to know about uranium and its usage as a nuclear fuel.

What is uranium and where can it be found?

Uranium is a heavy metal which occurs naturally in low concentrations in soil, rock and water. It is commercially extracted from uranium-bearing minerals.

About two-thirds of the world's production of uranium from mines is from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia, according to 2022 data from the World Nuclear Association.

What is uranium used for?

The radioactive metal is the most widely used fuel for nuclear energy due to its abundance and the relative ease of splitting its atoms. It is also used in treating cancer, for naval propulsion, and in nuclear weapons.

U-238 is the most common isotope of uranium found in nature but it cannot produce a fission chain reaction - the process of splitting a uranium atom to release energy.

The U-235 isotope, however, can be concentrated through a process called enrichment to produce energy by fission, making it suitable for use in nuclear reactors and weapons.

How Much Uranium Is Needed for A nuclear weapon

The amount of uranium that went missing contains enough of the U-235 isotope to build a first-generation nuclear bomb if enriched to over 90%, according to Dr. Edwin Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"It's not a direct or immediate proliferation threat, but the loss of the large amount of natural uranium is a concern because of its potential for conversion to nuclear weapons use material."

Should this incident be a cause for concern?

Dr Lyman says the incident raises questions about the capability of the IAEA to maintain its continuity of knowledge over nuclear materials in countries which are active conflict zones.

Libya has had little peace since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising ousted Muammar Gaddafi. Since 2014, political control has been split between rival eastern and western factions, with the last major bout of conflict ending in 2020.

Raising concerns about the remote location of the uranium ore and the vast infrastructure needed to enrich it, Scott Roecker, Vice President of Nuclear Materials Security at Nuclear Threat Initiative, said the worst case would be "that a country has a clandestine nuclear weapons program and is using that material for such a program."

Source: Reuters

Risk Warnings and Disclaimers

You understand and acknowledge that there is a high degree of risk involved in trading. Following any strategies or investment methods may lead to potential losses. The content on the site is provided by our contributors and analysts for information purposes only. You are solely responsible for determining whether any trading assets, securities, strategy, or any other product is suitable for investing based on your own investment objectives and financial situation.

Comments

Add to Favorites

Cohen

Political

Germany's first three-way coalition in decades was forged in crisis last year when unity was paramount. Now as it takes on major structural challenges, deep differences between the parties resurface, delaying critical decisions both at home and on the European stage.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis forced Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) to cross traditional red lines last year and agree hard compromises on nuclear energy, coal and defense.

Now though, as the urgency to act united subsides, they are locking horns over their signature policy issues in what they see as "pay back time" as one high-ranking government official put it.

The Greens in particular, but also the SPD, want to invest more in the transition to a low-carbon economy. The FDP on other hand, seeks a return to solid public finances after signing off on hundreds of billions of euros of exceptional expenditure during the pandemic and energy crisis.

Last week, those divisions prompted FDP leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who has ruled out tax increases, to delay the presentation of the 2024 budget.

The risk, say analysts, including Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING Germany, is that such rifts could delay projects needed to modernize Europe's largest economy.

Around 30 government initiatives are now held up by the coalition itself, whether it is speeding up the construction of public infrastructure, limiting red tape on renewable energy projects or banning new oil and gas heaters.

Julia Reuschenbach, political scientist at Berlin's Free University, said the FDP in particular was acting as the "inner opposition to its own government", in its attempts to raise its profile after a string of bitter regional electoral defeats.

German coalition disputes are also spilling over into European Union policymaking, sparking irritation among partners.

The bloc had to delay a vote originally scheduled last week on a landmark law to end sales of new CO2-emitting cars in 2035 after last-minute objections by Transport Minister Volker Wissing of the FDP to what appeared to be a long-agreed move.

Over the past year, Germany's hesitations over sending heavy weapons to Ukraine have also aggravated European and NATO partners.

Brzeski said that while German governments had learned to cope with crisis, "they do not have a good track record in dealing with structural transition - and this is what we are in now."

Responding to such criticism, a government spokesperson said Berlin was already dealing with multiple challenges posed by the transition to a carbon-neutral economy.

"These are processes that take some time. But the government has already agreed many decisions in its first year-and-a-half to drive the transformation. And it will continue to do so."

Fdp In Fight for Life

The German political system installed after the Nazi era ensures power is shared and restrained much more than in peers like Britain or France, said Philipp Koeker, political scientist at the University of Hanover.

Proportional representation, for example, means coalition governments are the norm, which can slow down decision-making.

But while some bickering between partners is hardly unusual, analysts and government insiders say lack of experience, electoral pressures and diversity of this coalition have contributed to the stalemate.

"Too many topics of dispute are simply being handed upwards," another senior government source said.

In an unusual exchange of letters last month, Lindner and Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens had sparred over the budget plans, with the latter expressing concern there would be insufficient funds for environmental projects.

Unlike Habeck or Scholz, Lindner is also his party's leader, which puts him in a particularly tight spot as someone responsible for government policy but also expected to appeal to voters. That can require uneasy compromises especially given that FDP is now fighting for its life. It is polling at just 5%, around a half of what it won in the 2021 general election, and at the threshold of what is needed to enter parliament.

There are also divisions between the SPD and the Greens - the government decided recently for example to shelve plans for a national security council because the SPD-run chancellery and the Greens-run foreign ministry could not agree who should run it, according to the two government sources.

Scholz, who is often criticised for being overly cautious, theoretically can use his right to issue binding policy guidelines to tell ministers what to do, said University of Hanover's Koeker.

However singling out just one minister could could result in that minister's party exiting the coalition, he said.

Instead Scholz has chosen to downplay differences and seek to ensure each party feels well represented, said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University.

"Above all he wants to keep the traffic light coalition together, even if it takes more time to reach decisions," he said, using the coalition's popular description based on party colours of red, green and yellow. "That is the price."

Source: Reuters

Risk Warnings and Disclaimers

Comments

Add to Favorites

Justin

Central Bank

Economic

Bond

The gilt market will be pushed to its limit with significantly more supply set to enter the hands of private investors than ever before. After Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt unveiled the budget on 15 March, the UK Debt Management Office announced its borrowing remit for the 2023-24 financial year with £241.1bn of planned gross gilt sales.

This will be a record amount of net gilt supply, taking into account the lack of quantitative easing and instead £80bn of quantitative tightening by the Bank of England during the financial year. The total net supply of gilts in the hands of private investors is set to reach £204bn, according to calculations by Antoine Bouvet, senior rates strategist at ING (Figure 1).

This figure is even higher than the projected total net gilt issuance of £116bn for the financial year following the infamous mini-budget presented by former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on 23 September in response to the energy crisis. Kwarteng swiftly scrapped large parts of the proposed tax cuts and other measures in a U-turn that later led to his resignation along with Liz Truss, prime minister at the time. The DMO is expected to round off the financial year with around £98bn of net borrowing, according to Bouvet – less than half of next year’s total.

While gilt sales reached £485.8bn in 2020-21 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, £388bn of this was consumed by the BoE’s QE programme, leaving £97.5bn of net supply. Now, there is no QE and the BoE is selling its own stock of gilts.

Figure 1. Gilt supply to reach record levels in 2023-24

The increase in supply after the budget was expected by investors. This explains the largely muted reaction to gilt yields, which have been falling since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in a flight to safety from investors. The 10-year gilt opened with a yield of 3.53% on 15 March before dropping to as low as 3.27% on the same day.

To take down much more supply than they have ever before will ask a lot from private investors. ‘The good news is that this is a known issue so investors had time to prepare,’ said Bouvet. ‘I don’t expect major trouble, but this makes the gilt market more sensitive to stress. For instance, I expect liquidity to be more challenging in times of market volatility.’

The gilt market is known for its stability even in volatile markets but the record amount of supply may see this disturbed. This will also mean the UK DMO will require even more steady hands to navigate its auctions and syndications with the help of its primary dealer group, who will themselves be under pressure with their market-making obligations.

According to Imogen Bachra, head of UK rates strategy at NatWest Markets, gilt yields will be pushed much higher by the incoming supply. ‘I think it should put significant upward pressure on yields, as the usual sectors of demand – LDI at the long-end, overseas investors out to the belly of the curve – have been noticeably absent of late,’ she said. ‘The clearing price of all these gilts will have to gradually shift lower and lower for the market to be able to absorb them.’

Bachra and her team at NatWest Markets have set a 4.3% target for 10-year gilt yields by Q3 in response to the heavy supply outlook.

From the £241.1bn of gross gilt issuance, £202.1bn will be sold through 66 auctions, with £86.7bn pushed to the short end of the curve. The remaining £27bn of issuance will be raised through seven syndications, of which three will be in an index-linked format. The UK will raise £10bn in green format.

Bouvet said outweighing sales to the front of the curve will help investors absorb the supply. ‘Front-end supply has lower duration, and so lower interest rate risk,’ he said. ‘This means that, for a given amount of interest rate risk, an investor can absorb a greater nominal amount of debt.’

However, Bachra is less sure. ‘It may do, in the sense that demand is more likely to materialise more quickly from the natural buyers at that part of the curve,’ she said. ‘It also helps in reducing the overall duration that will be issued to the market. But we had expected a larger skew away from longs and linkers, so relative to our expectations it is not that helpful.’

Source:Burhan Khadbai

To stay updated on all economic events of today, please check out our Economic calendar

Risk Warnings and Disclaimers

Comments

Add to Favorites

Kevin Du

Microsoft Corp-backed startup OpenAI began the rollout of GPT-4, a powerful artificial intelligence model that succeeds the technology behind the wildly popular ChatGPT.

GPT-4 is "multimodal", which means it can generate content from both image and text prompts.

What is the difference between gpt-4 and GPT-3.5?

GPT-3.5 takes only text prompts, whereas the latest version of the large language model can also use images as inputs to recognize objects in a picture and analyze them.

GPT-3.5 is limited to about 3,000-word responses, while GPT-4 can generate responses of more than 25,000 words.

GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content than its predecessor and scores 40% higher on certain tests of factuality.

It will also let developers decide their AI's style of tone and verbosity. For example, GPT-4 can assume a Socratic style of conversation and respond to questions with questions. The previous iteration of the technology had a fixed tone and style.

Soon ChatGPT users will have the option to change the chatbot's tone and style of responses, OpenAI said.

What are the capabilities of GPT-4?

The latest version has outperformed its predecessor in the U.S. bar exam and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). GPT-4 can also help individuals calculate their taxes, a demonstration by Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, showed.

The demo showed it could take a photo of a hand-drawn mock-up for a simple website and create a real one.

Be My Eyes, an app that caters to visually impaired people, will provide a virtual volunteer tool powered by GPT-4 on its app.

What are the limitations of GPT-4?

According to OpenAI, GPT-4 has similar limitations as its prior versions and is "less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios".

Inaccurate responses known as "hallucinations" have been a challenge for many AI programs, including GPT-4.

OpenAI said GPT-4 can rival human propagandists in many domains, especially when teamed up with a human editor.

It cited an example where GPT-4 came up with suggestions that seemed plausible, when it was asked about how to get two parties to disagree with each other.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said GPT-4 was "most capable and aligned" with human values and intent, though "it is still flawed."

GPT-4 generally lacks knowledge of events that occurred after September 2021, when the vast majority of its data was cut off. It also does not learn from experience.

Who has access to GPT-4?

While GPT-4 can process both text and image inputs, only the text-input feature will be available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and software developers, with a waitlist, while the image-input ability is not publicly available yet.

The subscription plan, which offers faster response time and priority access to new features and improvements, was launched in February and costs $20 per month.

GPT-4 powers Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot and some features on language learning platform Duolingo's subscription tier.

Source: Reuters

Risk Warnings and Disclaimers

Comments

Add to Favorites

Owen Li

Political

For decades, Philippine fishermen have laid out their catch each dawn at a seafood market on the shores of Manila Bay, their traditional system of hushed bartering giving the Bulungan (Whispering) market its name.

But fishermen and traders at the market in Paranaque City have been worried of late - concerned about the local government's plans for a 300-hectare (740-acre) land reclamation project that they say threatens their way of life, and earnings.

It is one of about 20 reclamation projects slated to be completed in Manila Bay over the next decade.

"The continuous dump-and-fill projects brought changes to the bay and its environment, and our catch has declined significantly," fisherman Gilbert Reyes told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"This is a huge loss for our families. Before, we could catch enough to survive for months," he said, adding his income had plummeted since the 1990s, before the construction of a huge shopping mall and factories on land reclaimed from the sea.

Land reclamation threatens stocks of sardines, mackerel, squid and other fish in the Manila Bay area by destroying breeding grounds, according to a report by Oceana Philippines, an environmental group.

Critics of the projects say they also increase the risk posed to coastal communities from flooding and storms linked to climate change by depleting coastal wetlands and mangrove forests that slow storm surges and soil erosion.

At the same time, research has linked increased groundwater extraction due to the developments to subsidence in the urban sprawl around Manila Bay that is home to the country's capital and some 23 million people.

The Manila Bay projects "manufacture new disaster risks where there were none before" by putting people and buildings in climate vulnerable coastal areas, said Kelvin Rodolfo, a marine geologist and professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

"When urban landscapes are built, people will be drawn because of the economic promises these places make. But in the case of the reclaimed lands in Manila Bay, people are going to be put directly in harm's way," he said, adding that reclamation works also threatened the area's marine ecosystem.

Mall Expansion Plan

Last year, fishermen and civic groups called for a moratorium on reclamation projects, saying permits have been granted without proper consideration of the social and environmental impact, including to their jobs.

Some of the nearly two dozen projects are already underway while others have yet to get the go ahead from planning and environmental officials.

One involves expanding the SM Mall of Asia - the world's fifth-biggest shopping centre - in Pasay City, which lies about five miles (8 km) from Paranaque City on a stretch of previously reclaimed land.

It will be extended as part of a 360-hectare (890-acre) reclamation partnership between the local government and mall developer SM Prime Holdings. The project also includes plans for a new business district, five-star hotel and convention centre, creating thousands of jobs and boosting city revenues.

But many fishermen like Reyes think the project is unlikely to benefit them, bringing only jobs for which they are poorly qualified.

"Where would they place the fishing sector, with ageing fisherfolk who didn't even finish school?" said the 43-year-old.

Representatives of Pasay City government and SM Prime did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the mall developer has said previously that it "complied with all the requirements" for the project.

In Paranaque City, the government's public relations head Catalino Alano said fishermen's voices "are being heard" with regards to the city's reclamation proposal.

He added that the government has been providing them with fuel subsidies, fishing supplies and financial aid during disasters.

Floods And Subsidence

About 40 miles (64 km) from Paranaque, on the northern side of Manila Bay in Bulacan province, some residents of fishing-reliant communities fear they will bear the brunt of the new $15-billion Manila International Airport, which is under-construction.

In 2021, the country's Environment Ministry granted the project an environmental compliance certificate - a requirement for any land development proposal - despite strong opposition from fishing community representatives and environmentalists.

Several groups asked the Supreme Court in 2020 to issue a writ against the construction of the airport on environmental grounds, but the court rejected it.

Once completed, the 2,500-hectare (6,180-acre) airport is expected to see 35 million passengers pass through annually. Supporters of the development say it is vital to solve Manila's acute flight congestion problems.

But opponents of the project say it will force fishermen in the towns of Taliptip and Bambang who live on the development site to leave their homes, and move to areas far their usual fishing grounds.

In Taliptip, a coastal town of 5,000 people, resident Rosalina Atenciana said some of her neighbours, who were mostly fishermen, have left the town after being paid compensation to relocate by the project's developer, San Miguel Corporation.

Hundreds of families have moved to make way for the airport works, but Atenciana said she was worried about leaving.

"We will not leave the town without a proper relocation area," she said.

"It should be a place where concrete livelihood opportunities exist because we need to raise our children and feed our families," she said.

San Miguel Corporation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Scientists have said subsidence in Taliptip - partly linked to the over-extraction of groundwater - is raising flood risks as global sea levels rise as a result of climate change.

Reclaiming even more land - with resulting construction on the land - could exacerbate the problem, they say.

Rodolfo, the marine geologist, also warned of the impact of coastal development projects on Manila Bay's marine life, including fish stocks.

For fishermen like Reyes, the impact is already being felt.

"If they continue with the reclamation projects, they're removing the fishing sector - a major provider of food - from the map," he said.

Source: Reuters

Risk Warnings and Disclaimers

Comments

Add to Favorites

Devin

Economic

For years, Sweden has been warned that its dysfunctional housing market, plagued by under-supply and kept aloft by low rates and generous tax benefits, was a risk to the wider economy.

Now those risks are becoming reality. Households with big mortgages are reining in spending as interest rates rise, and house-builders are pulling the plug on investment, tipping Sweden into recession.

The country is set to be the only EU economy experiencing outright recession this year. The crown is trading at around its weakest level against the euro since the global financial crisis, partly due to housing market worries, making the central bank's job of curbing inflation more difficult.

"It's not that no one saw this coming," Riksbank Governor Erik Thedeen said at the end of February. "The Riksbank has warned about this ... for a long time. And now it is clear that it is a problem."

After years of ultra-low borrowing costs, the pandemic and the Ukraine war have served up a toxic cocktail of high inflation and rapidly rising interest rates to many countries.

But in Sweden, the structural problems rooted in its housing market are magnifying the effects.

House prices in Sweden have almost quadrupled in the last 20 years, easily outstripping wage growth, boosted by generous mortgage tax relief, almost non-existent real estate taxes and a rental market with limited supply because of tight regulations.

Debt levels are among the highest in the European Union at around 200% of disposable incomes, much of which is mortgage debt. And around 60% of Swedes have floating-rate mortgages, meaning rate increases have an immediate impact on the majority of households.

Banking group Nordea expects household consumption to fall around 2% in 2023, while the National Board of Housing expects housing starts to fall around 50% in the coming year compared with 2021. Sweden Faces Recession as Housing Market Troubles Take Toll on Economy_1

Sweden Faces Recession as Housing Market Troubles Take Toll on Economy_1

Sweden Faces Recession as Housing Market Troubles Take Toll on Economy_2

Many home-owners are already struggling with higher mortgage repayments alongside surging food and energy prices - even though the full effects of interest rate rises over the last year have yet to be felt.

Philippa Logan, a single mother of two, bought her 89 square meter (958 square feet) apartment in Ostberga in the south of Stockholm in 2017 and paid off some of the mortgage after getting divorced in 2020.

"However, in the last few months, the interest rate has almost tripled making it almost unaffordable to survive," Logan said.

"The stress has been indescribable," she said, adding she had been forced to take on extra work to make ends meet.

The central bank expects further rate increases in the coming months. Markets expect borrowing costs to peak at 4%, up from 3% currently.

"Our forecast is for the Riksbank to raise rates to 3.75 as a peak," Gustav Helgesson, economist at Nordea said. "I think at that level we are very near some kind of pain threshold for households."

Home Truths

The European Commission expects Sweden's gross domestic product to contract by around 1% this year - the only country in the 27-member bloc likely to see negative annual growth.

Nordea expects GDP to contract by around 2%.

House prices are down around 15% since their peak in spring last year, a bigger drop than during the global financial crisis. Some regions have experienced a fall of as much as 40%, the real estate division of insurer Lansforsakringar said.

Sweden Faces Recession as Housing Market Troubles Take Toll on Economy_3

While Sweden is not alone in seeing big house price falls, its households are almost uniquely sensitive to interest rate hikes because more than half have floating rate mortgages.

In Germany, for example, most borrowers have fixed mortgages and rising rates have largely been shrugged off.

"No, we don't have any fear with the mortgages," said Hannah, a teacher in the city of Bochum, in the west of the country, whose joint mortgage with her partner is fixed at 0.9%.

"We have 15 years to pay back and it was all planned in a way that we could pay back even if interest rates rose," she said.

In Canada, while debt levels are high, variable rate mortgages only account for about one-third of total outstanding mortgage debt, according to the Bank of Canada.

While some economists predict a mild recession in Canada, the OECD think tank expects the Canadian economy will grow around 1.3% in 2023.

A fixer-upper?

Sweden's housing problems date back decades, but have proven hard to fix.

Plans to ease rent controls have been fiercely opposed by the political left which believes introducing market forces would increase social division by pricing many people out of desirable areas of Sweden's cities.

All the main political parties agree an overhaul of mortgage tax relief is needed, but none are prepared to give their rivals a stick to beat them with when elections come around.

Reintroducing a property tax, abolished in 2008, is seen as another sure-fire vote-loser.

Financial regulators have introduced tougher lending practices and tightened mortgage repayment rules. Sweden's banks are among the most strongly capitalised in Europe - partly as a result of worries about the housing market.

These should prevent falling real estate prices from triggering a financial meltdown as happened in Sweden in the early 1990s.

But Sweden's economy is likely to remain a hostage to imbalances in the housing market while its structural problems go unresolved.

"It's up to the politicians to decide whether they want to deal with these problems and, more than anything, when," Nordea's Helgesson said. "In the current situation, it is very hard to tackle them."

($1 = 10.6895 Swedish crowns)

Source: Yahoo

To stay updated on all economic events of today, please check out our Economic calendar

Risk Warnings and Disclaimers

Comments

Add to Favorites

Justin

Economic

Western visitors returning to China for face-to-face meetings, as OMFIF did last week, will find a country as keen to attract outside investment as it is to develop a self-sufficient financial and technological ecosystem. Hong Kong’s role in this complex process seems more important than before.

Hong Kong has noticed a marked outflowing of wealth management operations to Singapore and is now putting together a well-funded campaign to try to reverse the trend. To hear this from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, InvestHK and others based in the special administrative region isn’t surprising. To hear it from the People’s Bank of China and the major Chinese banks perhaps is. The clarity and uniformity of the message sounded like Chinese government policy. Why?

The wealth management migration is attributed to political risk, as some high-level financiers have disappeared in Hong Kong and found themselves helping Chinese authorities with their enquiries. Departing expats grumble about the national security law, although a Hong Kong official contended that it is less stringent than the US Patriot Act.

Before Covid-19, when civil unrest in Hong Kong was more of a visible nuisance for Beijing than it is now, financiers suggested that Hong Kong would eventually become merely a suburb of neighbouring Shenzhen on the mainland, now a 15-minute train ride away. The political unrest has subsided, while China’s interest in attracting external investment has risen.

A senior regional government official, who had managed to attract a foreign whisky producer to his city despite the challenges of doing business during Covid-19, enquired how serious a problem OMFIF thought China’s indebtedness is (with a 273% economy-wide debt to gross domestic product ratio). Another mentioned state belt-tightening after Covid-19, alongside a keenness to re-engage foreign direct investment in China’s expected resumption of growth (5% in 2023 versus a little more or less than 1% in the US and euro area respectively). A central banking official also raised the idea of converting troubled Belt and Road Initiative debts into bonds to move them off Chinese bank balance sheets and into the capital markets at large.

China’s capital account remains materially closed. Investment in onshore securities requires qualified foreign institutional investor status. The Shanghai Stock Exchange enables international investors to access some Chinese securities via its Stock Connect programmes, including with Hong Kong, and the SAR remains a key venue for major Chinese companies. Alibaba has moved there from the US as geopolitical rivalry increases. The US Inflation Reduction Act includes a provision to prevent subsidies drifting towards Chinese battery makers, for example.

Though some suggested that the resumption of face-to-face business meetings would improve East-West estrangement by osmosis, most Chinese bankers are under no illusions about American political antipathy. The idea that this lives in a separate universe to the $700bn mutual trade relationship is beginning to erode. We heard anecdotal evidence of US asset management investment decisions being withdrawn.

Our interlocutors are still trying to work out whether Europe is in the same camp. While Germany, for example, has said it is in no rush to decouple, European receptiveness probably depends on the materiality of Chinese support for Russia’s military operations in Ukraine.

Those officials hosting OMFIF did not need prompting to raise this prickly theme, though they greeted with mild acquiescence rather than enthusiastic endorsement the idea that China might hold the answer to ending the war.

Trade and investment with the UK are even more ambiguous for Chinese business people. There is pragmatic acceptance in private that mutual investment in strategic technology is moving off limits. But there is also frustration at the unpredictable nature of the rules as the ruling Conservative party under an assortment of prime ministers zigzags between crass mercantilism and American-sponsored Sinophobia.

The UK remains an interesting case for the Chinese. It is home to a global bank with Chinese roots, has long-standing business links via Hong Kong and a well-developed global financial centre. China sends the largest cohort of foreign students to British universities. OMFIF met officials who expected this to continue despite geopolitical divergence and the UK’s perceived tutelage to US priorities, which include the ring-fencing of key technologies, protection of the leading global reserve and trading currency and defence of interests in the Pacific region.

The PBoC, which emphasised to OMFIF the importance of Hong Kong to the Chinese capital markets ecosystem, dismissed the idea that China seeks to supplant the dollar. But it raised the not unreasonable suggestion that China’s $18tn economy might conduct trade with partners in its own currency.

Meanwhile the ‘mBridge’ cross-border central bank digital currency project, which includes the UAE as well as PBoC, looks to some like the potential evolution of a financial ecosystem outside the control of the West – as Swift is perceived to be and was obliged to sanction Russia. mBridge includes Hong Kong, whose currency remains pegged to the dollar and whose financial markets are still underpinned by ‘Common Law’, praised by President Xi Jinping last year despite its colonial origins.

Hong Kong’s twin life between Chinese and Anglo-Saxon financial systems is only going to become more important as those ecosystems diverge, while needing still to do business.