Category: 3. Business

Following the US tariff announcement on the so-called ‘Liberation Day’, Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong warned the nation to “brace ourselves for more shocks to come”. This has proved prescient. Global uncertainty has become the norm, and maintaining resilience while pressing ahead with reforms to promote long-term growth is essential for effective policymaking.

AMRO’s 2025 Annual Consultation Report on Singapore shows that Singapore has weathered external shocks well thus far. It also illustrates how strong policymaking, preparedness, and the ability to leverage structural advantages can reinforce resilience and support future competitiveness and growth potentials. The key takeaways from the report released today are:

1) Growth has been revised up significantly from October.

Singapore’s GDP is projected to grow by 4.1 percent in 2025 and 2.5 percent in 2026 – a sharp upward revision from our October projections of 2.6 and 1.7 respectively. The upgrade reflects solid performance in the first three quarters of 2025, supported by the global electronics upcycle, AI-related demand, and strong activity in financial services. However, the near-term outlook remains vulnerable to external risks, particularly US trade policy shifts and weaker global growth, even as the announced 100-percent tariff on pharmaceuticals has been delayed,

2) An adept mix of fiscal, monetary and trade policies will be needed to cushion near-term impacts from trade disruptions.

Fiscal support should be targeted to vulnerable businesses and households, while broad-based transfers should be phased out gradually. An easier monetary policy stance remains appropriate given the uncertain outlook and low inflation—projected at 0.9 in 2025 and 0.8 percent in 2026. However, sustained capital inflows, while contributing to lower domestic interest rates, could impose an upward pressure on the exchange rate and present challenges to monetary policy implementation. Meanwhile, strengthening international trade agreements and ensuring businesses fully utilize them will help unlock new export opportunities and diversify markets.

3) A whole-of-government approach is helping safeguard a stable and sustainable property market.

Close coordination across agencies has enabled the effective implementation of both demand- and supply- side measures to moderate property price increases. These include macroprudential and property market measures as well as efforts to increase housing supply. Maintaining tight macroprudential measures will help contain risks of property market overheating and rapid household debt accumulation amid lower interest rates induced by capital inflows.

4) Singapore must preserve its competitive edge amid aging and rising trade fragmentation.

Boosting workforce adaptability, fostering a dynamic business environment, accelerating the adoption of automation, and maintaining an agile regulatory framework will be key to maintain competitiveness. A multipronged approach, including fiscal and healthcare reforms, can help address structural challenges, particularly from demographic change.

5) Singapore is well placed to advance regional integration, lifting growth potential domestically and across ASEAN.

The Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone could serve as a blueprint for deeper intra-ASEAN integration, while ongoing regional initiatives on digital payments and financial market infrastructure connectivity are strengthening financial linkages. Singapore’s notable progress on climate adaptation and mitigation also positions it to play a leading role in regional climate governance and collaboration.

Conclusion

Singapore’s experience shows that resilience is not accidental. It is built through prudent policies, strategic foresight, and the agility to respond to emerging risks. As global uncertainties persist, the country’s continued commitment to sound macroeconomic management and structural reform will be vital to sustaining growth, enhancing competitiveness, and contributing to a more integrated and resilient ASEAN region.

By David Weidner

An always-on crypto hype machine lives to goose prices and then blame ‘macro’ when the selloff hits

As bitcoin cracked, liquidations mounted and short-term holders capitulated.

It’s the oldest game on Wall Street – the pump and dump. Only the tools have changed.

They came in by the tens of thousands: young, internet-native, mostly male, lured by the promise of lightning gains and financial freedom. For many, crypto wasn’t just an asset class – it was a storyline; a chance to get rich quickly and grab outsized returns before the mainstream figured out what was happening. That story was sold to them constantly through late-night livestreams, hyped Twitter threads, “moon or bust” Discord raids.

Now, after the crash, the crypto bros are showing signs of burnout – drained from margin calls, bag-holding and fading hope that the next “rocket tweet” will ever get them back to the high they were chasing.

The November wreck in bitcoin (BTCUSD) – from north of $120,000 to the low $80,000s – didn’t come out of nowhere. It was manufactured in plain sight by an always-on hype machine that lives to goose prices and then blame “macro” when gravity returns. Sure, crypto, including bitcoin, has rallied since falling below $85,000, but its “November to remember” crash wiped out dumb money. The subsequent rally only shows there’s dumber money out there.

We watched the script unfold in real time: chest-thumping year-end calls, retail pile-ins and leverage, a sharp downdraft, and then the postmortems telling the faithful to HODL [hold on for dear life] because the next big rally is imminent. Meanwhile, investors who bought the story are walking away. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs bled roughly $3.5-$4 billion in November – their worst month since launch – as bitcoin erased its 2025 gains and slid into December still falling.

With crypto, you rarely need a smoking gun; leverage and narrative do the job.

This is how a walled-garden market works. Crypto’s most influential voices sell a future where bitcoin hedges U.S. dollar DXY debasement and soon sits beside gold (GC00) on central-bank balance sheets. Then they flood social media with price targets timed for maximum virality.

Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder, held the line on a $200,000 to $250,000 year-end bitcoin target even after November’s plunge – echoed by reposts and crypto media. Michael Saylor’s camp predicted $150,000 “by end of this year,” while VanEck reiterated an $180,000 “year-end” bitcoin target as late as August. This cheerleading sets sentiment, drives flows and helps build the runway for the next “sell the news.”

Then comes the unwind. With crypto, you rarely need a smoking gun – leverage and narrative do the job. As bitcoin cracked, liquidations mounted and short-term holders capitulated, while ETFs registered heavy outflows. The result was a trillion-dollar drawdown across digital assets and a price air-pocket down to the $80,000s. Even sympathetic analysts called it a classic “reset.” That’s a polite word for a market built on promotion, margin and the hope that the next post goes viral.

“Finfluencers” and coordinated campaigns can spark short-lived pops that fade once the insiders are out.

If this sounds like the oldest game on Wall Street – the pump and dump – that’s because it is. Only the tools have changed. “Finfluencers” and coordinated campaigns can spark short-lived pops that fade once the insiders are out. Crypto markets have billions in wash trading – fake volume that flatters momentum and dupes newcomers. Influencer calls deliver initial bumps that quickly evaporate.

Unsuspecting investors are told bitcoin isn’t just a trade – it’s insurance against the dollar – and, any day now, central banks will buy it. The facts say otherwise. The BIS, IMF and major central bankers keep drawing the same bright line: crypto is speculative, volatile and unsuitable as reserves; banks’ crypto exposure is tightly capped under global rules. Switzerland’s central bank publicly rebuffed bitcoin for reserves this year. Yes, you’ll find a headline-grabbing outlier – the Czech governor floated a small reserve allocation – but that remains a lonely view.

Read: For these big players, bitcoin investing is all about power

Crypto fatigue is setting in

If your due diligence begins and ends on social-media and chats, you’re playing a game where the other side writes the rules and the storyline.

Meanwhile, retail is exhausted. November brought multibillion-dollar redemptions, three straight weeks of ETF outflows and headlines about “crypto winter” all over again. Trading desks talk about “seller fatigue,” but that’s after the selling.

There’s a less glamorous explanation for bitcoin’s November plunge: It was due to content – a deliberate online campaign cycle. Early in the fall, the most widely followed social-media accounts planted calls for a bitcoin moonshot by December.

The memes did their work. Leverage piled in, and, when macro jitters and ETF outflows hit, the same voices reframed it as “healthy” before re-upping the end-of-year targets. Hayes’s bitcoin $250,000 post ricocheted across X; Saylor-adjacent channels packaged “this-year” price decks. In an unregulated attention economy, those posts are order flow. And when the tide turns, the exit is narrow.

The market structure amplifies it. Crypto still trades on venues where leverage is cheap, surveillance is lighter than with equities and market-making and marketing are indistinguishable. Crypto isn’t price risk; it’s narrative risk.

The crypto-hedge story – inflation, deficits, dollar debasement – sounds reasonable until investors find the correlations aren’t stable enough in the moments we need them most. November’s drop arrived alongside broader risk-off and funding stress – exactly when a “hedge” should help. Instead, bitcoin traded like a high-beta risk asset. Even crypto-friendly explainers acknowledged the slide reflected investors “ditching risk” and short-term capitulation.

Investors aren’t dumb. They’re human. Many of them are young and inexperienced. They listen to confident voices. But if your due diligence begins and ends on social media and chats, you’re playing a game where the other side writes the rules and the storyline. November was the reminder that, when an “asset” depends on engagement to work, the product is you.

Ultimately, investors should treat crypto’s influencer economy like any other funnel. When the call is for a year-end moonshot, ask who benefits if you buy that exposure today – and who’s already positioned to sell it back to you tomorrow. Recognize that the adoption stories (dollar hedge, central banks) remain mostly marketing copy, not monetary policy. If you still want exposure, size it like a lottery ticket, not a Treasury bill.

And when the next “healthy reset” arrives? Remember November.

David Weidner writes about markets, money and the stories behind them. His work has appeared in MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal, McKinsey Quarterly, The Deal and American Banker.

Plus: This ‘safe’ cryptocurrency promises stability – but its claim is shaky

More: If you’re this type of investor, get out of the stock market now

-David Weidner

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Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco on Monday, he pointed out that the company—a key enabler in the AI infrastructure landscape—has been working on AI since well before large language models came along and took the long view.

“We also knew that the the most problematic thing that was going to happen was going to be energy, because energy and data centers were going to become a bottleneck alongside chips,” Kurian told Fortune’sAndrew Nusca. “So we designed our machines to be super efficient.”

The International Energy Agency has estimated that some AI-focused data centers consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes, and some of the largest facilities under construction could even use 20 times that amount.

At the same time, worldwide data center capacity will increase by 46% over the next two years, equivalent to a jump of almost 21,000 megawatts, according to real estate consultancy Knight Frank.  

At the Brainstorm event, Kurian laid out Google Cloud’s three-pronged approach to ensuring that there will be enough energy to meet all that demand.

First, the company seeks to be as diversified as possible in the kinds of energy that power AI computation. While many people say any form of energy can be used, that’s actually not true, he said.

“If you’re running a cluster for training and you bring it up and you start running a training job, the spike that you have with that computation draws so much energy that you can’t handle that from some forms of energy production,” Kurian explained.

The second part of Google Cloud’s strategy is being as efficient as possible, including how it reuses energy within data centers, he added.

In fact, the company uses AI in its control systems to monitor thermodynamic exchanges necessary in harnessing the energy that has already been brought into data centers.

And third, Google Cloud is working on “some new fundamental technologies to actually create energy in new forms,” Kurian said without elaborating further.

Earlier on Monday, utility company NextEra Energy and Google Cloud said they are expanding their partnership and will develop new U.S. data center campuses that will include with new power plants as well.

Tech leaders have warned that energy supply is critical to AI development alongside innovations in chips and improved language models.

The ability to build data centers is another potential chokepoint as well. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently pointed out China’s advantage on that front compared to the U.S.

“If you want to build a data center here in the United States, from breaking ground to standing up an AI supercomputer is probably about three years,” he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in late November. “They can build a hospital in a weekend.”

A new clinical trial suggests that pairing bispecific antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates with CAR T-cell therapy may sharply boost one-year progression-free survival for people with aggressive lymphoma.

In just a few years, treatment options for aggressive lymphoma have rapidly advanced. However, many patients show a consistent pattern: powerful new therapies act quickly but often fail to keep the lymphoma at bay permanently, says Jay Spiegel, M.D., a transplant and cellular therapy physician at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Spiegel will present the early findings Dec. 8 at the 2025 American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting in Orlando.

We have made huge improvements in lymphoma care. But there are still many patients where the current approaches are not curative.”

Jay Spiegel, M.D., a transplant and cellular therapy physician, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center

That challenge inspired a new clinical trial – the researchers, led by senior author Lazaros Lekakis, M.D., professor of clinical medicine at the Miller School, combined three of the most promising lymphoma treatments, aiming to improve outcomes.

The clinical trial data indicate that combining these treatments may significantly enhance progression-free survival at one year.

Layered therapies extend responses

Large B-cell lymphoma is the most common aggressive lymphoma in adults. Its most frequent subtype, diffuse LBCL, affects about 25,000 people in the U.S. each year. First-round treatments work for approximately 70% of patients. 

For the 30% whose lymphoma comes back or never fully disappears, the next step is often CAR T-cell therapy, such as axicabtagene ciloleucel, approved in 2017. It trains a patient’s immune cells to target lymphoma.

“CAR T works incredibly well upfront,” Spiegel said, “but we’ve learned that it often falls short in the long-term – only about 40% of patients remain in remission after five years.”

So, researchers have designed other new therapies. Mosunetuzumab is a two-headed bispecific antibody that links a T-cell to a lymphoma cell, activating the immune system to attack. Polatuzumab is an antibody–drug conjugate, meaning it delivers a small dose of chemotherapy directly into lymphoma cells. Both are effective initially but don’t reliably keep the disease away when used alone.

To boost the durability of these new treatments, the Sylvester team integrated all three approaches. “Attacking three different antigens at once could help overcome several of the reasons CAR T fails,” Spiegel said. “The hope was that combining them could really jump the efficacy, and so far, it has been quite something.”

The phase 2 study enrolled 25 adults with relapsed or refractory LBCL. They received mosunetuzumab and polatuzumab before and after the CAR T treatment. Of the 24 patients who reached day 90, 90% were in complete remission. At one year, about 80% were still in remission, a significant increase from an estimated 50% at one year with CAR T alone.

“I did not think it would work this well,” Spiegel said. “To take patients with this type of aggressive disease and have so many still in remission at one year, that really surprised me.”

The Sylvester trial might provide a way to achieve longer remissions. “We have an exciting result,” Spiegel said, “but now we need to show it can be done on a larger scale. That is the goal of the next study, to prove the juice is worth the squeeze.”

As encouraging as the findings are, they arrive in a field moving at an extraordinary pace as researchers are continually testing new immunotherapies, improving CAR T treatments, and exploring fresh drug targets. “Everything in lymphoma is happening all at once,” Spiegel said. “It makes the field exciting but also complicated.”

That pace presents both opportunity and complexity as clinicians work to understand how each advancement fits into the broader treatment landscape – and how they can work together. The current challenge is figuring out the best sequences and combinations for these new treatments – and how to use each without exhausting the immune system, Spiegel said.

In this surge of treatment options, the message for patients is increasingly hopeful. “If you have relapsed disease, even aggressive disease, there are multiple approaches now that can still cure your lymphoma,” Spiegel said. “That was not true seven years ago.”

By Scott Murdoch

SYDNEY, Dec 9 (Reuters) – The chief investment officer of Australian pension fund Aware Super says there are flashing “orange” lights in some funding ​arrangements in the global artificial intelligence industry but earnings growth is backing up ‌the sector’s current valuations.

Simon Warner, who became CIO of the A$210 billion ($135.75 billion) fund last week, said ‌the future trajectory of the AI industry’s economic model was the most prominent financial market risk in 2026.

Soaring AI stock valuations have started to weigh on global markets as investors question when huge capital investments will translate into profits.

“We’ve taken great comfort in most of ⁠the last few years that ‌the capital investment into both large language models, but also into the data centers and all the infrastructure to support AI, has ‍been from very stable sources of funding, largely from retained earnings,” Warner told Reuters in an interview.

“There’s been some instances in the last six months or so where that’s softened a bit, ​there’s more circular financing, a bit more conduit financing. Nothing that flashes red, but ‌things that certainly flash orange.”

Warner said there was an interdependence between capital expenditure valuations in the so called “Magnificent Seven” stocks and broader wealth effects and domestic demand in the U.S.

“I do think there is a dynamic there, but if one of those pillars was to stumble, then we could have a correction,” he said.

“That is something we ⁠are watching very closely.”

Meta said in late October ​it had struck a $27 billion financing deal with ​Blue Owl Capital to fund its biggest data center project globally, as large technology companies race to build out the infrastructure needed to power ‍their artificial intelligence ambitions.

Microsoft ⁠was Aware’s second-largest listed stock investment in its balanced fund at the end of June, according to filings. It also owns Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet and Meta among ⁠others.

Warner said while some investors remained wary of AI and tech-related stocks valuations, there were risks to ‌those valuations if capital expenditure levels started to decline.

($1 = 1.5101 Australian dollars)

(Reporting ‌by Scott Murdoch; Editing by Sonali Desai)