The AI Boom’s Hidden Victim: Taiwan’s Fragile Insurance Sector
Chang-tai Hsieh warns that Taiwan's AI-driven export boom is quietly destabilizing its life insurance sector, as regulators abandon mark-to-market accounting to mask growing foreign exchange risks. With insurers slashing currency hedges on half a trillion dollars in U.S. bond holdings, a rising NT dollar could leave them unable to cover what they owe policyholders—and Hsieh suspects the Central Bank may be quietly complicit. When the reckoning arrives, will it be the institutions that took the risks, or ordinary Taiwanese families, who are left to pay the bill?
Iran War Reveals Taiwan’s Natural Gas Crisis
With just 11 days of natural gas reserves — the lowest in East Asia — and over a third of its gas supply routed through the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan's energy vulnerability has never looked more exposed than since war broke out in Iran. As Taipei scrambles for stopgap measures, a striking irony emerges: the United States, the very power that launched the conflict, stands to become Taiwan's dominant energy supplier.
The Empty Cradle: Why Cash Incentives Can’t Fix Taiwan’s Birth Rate
Birth rates have been declining year after year, with each generation's population set to shrink by half — so why do government subsidies keep increasing yet fail to rescue fertility rates? A new study by a Nobel Prize-winning scholar reveals one key factor: the household labor time gap. How does the divide between modern men and women in their expectations of family life make 'staying single and childless' a choice of self-preservation?