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Seoul, South Korea
 — 

Three billionaires surprised diners when they walked into a popular fried chicken restaurant on Thursday – and picked up everyone’s bill.

Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company, AI chip giant Nvidia, went to the Seoul chicken-and-beer joint with the leaders of two of South Korea’s global tech titans: Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group executive chair Chung Eui-sun.

Fried chicken paired with ice-cold draft beer, known as “chimaek,” is a must-have for anyone visiting South Korea, and the tech potentates got their fill at Kkanbu Chicken in the heart of the nation’s capital, ahead of the APEC summit in Gyeongju.

“I love fried chicken and beer with my friends, so Kkanbu is a perfect place, right?” Huang told live-streaming passersby as he arrived at the restaurant. As well as being the name of the restaurant chain, “Kkanbu” is a slang word for a very close friend.

The three ate cheese balls, cheese sticks, boneless chicken and a fried chicken along with Korean beer Terra and the local rice spirit soju, according to national news agency Yonhap.

Video from local news outlets showed the trio – combined net worth $195 billion – linking their drinking arms to take a shot of beer, a gesture that, in South Korea, cements friendship while drinking.

Huang, Lee and Chung stepped out to offer chicken and cheese sticks to the assembled crowd.

“The chicken wings was so good. Have you been here before? It’s incredible, right?” Huang said when asked about his favourite items.

“Anyone? Fried chicken?” he offered as he held chicken baskets up.

When Huang rang the “golden bell,” a gesture to pay the bill for everyone in the restaurant, people cheered — though Samsung’s Lee paid the bill and Chung paid for a second round, according to Yonhap.

Fresh from his high-stakes trade talks with US President Donald Trump, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is among Asian heads of government who have descended on Gyeongju, in southern South Korea, for the APEC summit.

Access to cutting-edge AI chips – such as those that have pushed Nvidia to a market cap of about $5 trillion – is among issues being thrashed out between the US and China.

After their dinner at Kkanbu Chicken, the three leaders headed to Nvidia’s GeForce Gamer Festival, where Huang – flanked by Lee and Chung – promised to make a big announcement at the APEC summit on Friday.

“My announcements include my friends and we’re going to do amazing things for the future of Korea,” he told the crowd.

“As we transition our portfolio, and connect our customers to a sustainable future, we need to ensure that today’s business remains productive and competitive in this changing market while we continue to invest in our business for tomorrow,” an AGL spokesperson said.

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Total cuts could be up to 300 roles, The Australian newspaper reported. The AGL spokesperson did not say exactly how many jobs out of its total workforce of about 4,200 would be cut.

“We understand this may be a difficult time for our people and we’re committed to communicating with transparency and respect and providing support throughout the consultation process,” the spokesperson said.

The company, which generates and sells power, has said previously that it plans to spend up to A$20 billion ($13 billion) in the next decade to build out clean energy and storage capacity to replace its ageing coal fleet.

AGL, which has the highest carbon emissions footprint in Australia, separately said on Friday it will buy four new gas turbines from Siemens AB for its Kwinana gas peaking power plant in Western Australia for A$185 million.

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The Federal Reserve is set to begin expanding its balance sheet again early next year, helping to ease investors’ fears over the daunting borrowing needs of the world’s most important economy.

Fed officials called time on their three-year quantitative tightening programme on Wednesday, with chair Jay Powell acknowledging that the central bank was soon likely to return to becoming a substantial buyer of US Treasuries.

“At a certain point, you’ll want . . . reserves to start gradually growing to keep up with the size of the banking system and the size of the economy,” Powell said.

Fed-watchers think that point could come as soon as the turn of the year.

“We think that the Fed will start buying enough Treasuries to grow the balance sheet again in the first quarter of next year — most likely January and at the latest in March,” said Marco Casiraghi, of Evercore ISI.

Casiraghi added that he expected net purchases of $35bn of Treasuries a month — expanding the Fed’s $6.6tn balance sheet by about $20bn a month, as the Fed will continue to roll off its stock of mortgage-backed securities.

Those purchases will help assure investors who have become worried about the US’s ability to finance its debt payments. More buyers for the bonds should push down yields, making the debt cheaper.

Market anxiety has eased amid expectations the Fed will call time on QT and fund managers respond to signs that budget deficits — averaging about 6 per cent of GDP despite full employment — may improve.

Markets are now “less worried about supply”, said Mark Cabana, head of US rates strategy at Bank of America. “Concerns about the deficit worsening have been cooled due to strong tariff revenues, and the expectation that the Fed will soon start buying [government debt].”

A big rally in 10-year US Treasury bonds since the summer has pushed down their yield, the benchmark for global borrowing costs, from a peak of 4.8 per cent in January to less than 4.1 per cent.

A key driver of the rally has been growing expectations of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, but the gap between the yields on government bonds and interest rate swaps — an indicator of investor concerns over debt issuance — has also shrunk. 

The additional yield on 10-year Treasuries above that of interest rate swaps of the same maturity has roughly halved from its April peak, to about 0.16 percentage points.

“It does seem like the worst fears have been proven wrong, and that the concerns around forever-rising [sovereign debt] supply could be somewhat overblown,” said Ed Acton, a rates strategist at Citi.

Bond yields and swap rates typically trade closely together, as both reflect longer-term interest rate expectations.

But in countries such as the UK and US, yields have climbed well above swap rates this year, as investors demanded extra compensation for buying record quantities of sovereign debt.

An easing of tension over borrowing has also shown up in the so-called flattening of yield curves on government bonds, as the amount being demanded by investors to lend over a longer timeframe has fallen.

Thirty-year Treasury bonds now offer just 1 percentage point in extra yield relative to 2-year bonds, down from above 1.3 percentage points in September.

Moves by policymakers in the US, UK and Japan to shorten the maturity of government issuance have also helped to soothe concerns over a glut of long-term government debt.

In the UK, the gap between 10-year gilt yields and swap rates has fallen from a peak of almost 0.4 percentage points in April to around 0.25 points, aided by a strong rally in gilts in recent weeks.

The Fed took the decision to halt so-called quantitative tightening amid signs that its efforts to drain liquidity from the financial system were causing strains in short-term funding markets. 

Analysts say the Fed’s return to bond-buying reflects a desire by US lenders to hold more reserves, and would not represent a return to quantitative easing — the policy deployed by the Fed and other central banks to ease financial and economic tensions by buying trillions of dollars’ worth of government debt.

QE is a much more aggressive form of injecting liquidity into the financial system, aimed at countering periods of acute stress.

“The idea would be to have enough reserves in the system to allow for the smooth implementation of monetary policy — it matches what Fed officials have referred to as an ample reserves framework, which is different from QE,” said Casiraghi.

Under the ample reserves regime, the Fed’s balance sheet would expand at about the same rate as nominal GDP — the sum of an economy’s growth and inflation rates.  

Casiraghi added: “In QE, the ratio of reserves to nominal GDP jumps.”  

The end to QT has helped to reignite a popular hedge fund bet on Treasury yields converging with swap rates, according to market participants.

Investors poured into the so-called swap spread trade early this year, wagering that a regulatory overhaul would boost demand for Treasuries by making it less expensive for banks to hold them. 

But the trade blew up as Treasury yields rose following Trump’s “liberation day” announcement — forcing a painful unwind of the trade that fuelled broader market volatility.

The prospect of the Fed ending QT had “directed more flows” into the trade in recent weeks, said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US rates strategy at TD Securities.

But with the US government debt burden relative to GDP on track to overtake Italy’s later on this decade, and ongoing debt worries in big economies including the UK and France, investors said the positive moves could be just a temporary easing of concerns about debt sustainability.

“The bigger picture is that US fiscal deficits are set to remain ugly as hell for the foreseeable future,” said Mike Riddell, a fund manager at Fidelity International. “Maybe not quite as bad as feared a few months ago, but still unsustainably large.”

Almost 2 million energy bill payers could be owed a share of £240m from old accounts that were closed while still in credit, according to the regulator.

The latest figures from Ofgem show that about 1.9m energy accounts were closed over the past five years, with outstanding credit balances totalling £240m left unclaimed.

The regulator is urging anyone who has moved in recent years to check whether they are owed a refund from their previous account. Some may be owed only a few pounds, but others could be owed more than £100, Ofgem said.

Tim Jarvis, Ofgem’s director general of markets, said that although suppliers “work very hard to return money to people” when they close an account, in line with industry rules, “without the right contact details, they’re stuck”.

“The message is clear – if you’ve moved in the last five years, reach out to your old supplier, provide them with the correct information, and you could be due a refund,” Jarvis said.

Energy bill payers face a difficult winter after the regulator lifted the maximum cap that suppliers can charge their 29 million household customers for each unit of gas and electricity from the start of this month.

The average price cap for households paying by direct debit increased by £35 to £1,755 for a typical annual dual-fuel bill, despite a 2% fall in the wholesale price in the energy markets over the summer, reigniting concerns about energy affordability in the UK.

Ofgem said on Thursday that it would move ahead with plans to clear £500m of debt from about 195,000 people on means-tested benefits who have built up debt of more than £100 during the energy crisis.

The first phase of its scheme could offer debt relief of about £1,200 per account, or about £2,400 per dual-fuel customer, to eligible bill payers. The cost of this policy would be paid for by adding about £5 a year on the average dual-fuel bill by 2027-28.

This measure is expected to make only a small dent in Britain’s deepening energy debt crisis, which reached a record £4.4bn in unpaid bills as of the end of June. The Office for National Statistics found that a record proportion of British households were unable to pay their energy bills by direct debt in April because there was not enough money in their bank accounts.