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Australia to Toughen Foreign Investment Laws Amid China Spat – Yahoo Canada Finance

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Australia to Toughen Foreign Investment Laws Amid China Spat

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(Bloomberg) — Australia will implement a tough new screening regime on foreign investors seeking to buy sensitive assets, as it bids to bolster national security amid a diplomatic row with China.

Telecommunications, energy, technology and defense-manufacturing companies will be included in the zero-dollar threshold for screening. The changes, intended to be legislated this year and enforced from Jan. 1, will include a new national security test and give the treasurer last-resort powers to force asset sales.

The changes could have implications on Australia’s relationship with its largest trading partner China, which have soured this year after Prime Minister Scott Morrison led calls for an independent probe on the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan.

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Beijing responded with verbal attacks on the conservative government, saying it was doing the bidding of key ally the U.S., while new tariffs on Australian barley and a ban on beef from four meatworks have raised fears in Canberra that the Chinese government is using “economic coercion” in retaliation.

Asked by a reporter in Canberra on Friday whether the changes will create new tensions with China, Morrison said: “I don’t believe why it should. Countries make decisions on their own interests for their own rules and we respect the rules and interests of other countries.”

Wider Concerns

Australia isn’t alone in ramping up its foreign investment screening — in recent years, economies including the U.S., Japan and the European Union have toughened their own laws to protect national security. The new announcement comes a day after Morrison signed a crucial defense agreement with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and upgraded ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, as both nations navigate fraught relations with China.

“We have to be on our guard against China purchasing critical infrastructure and investing in our vital industries, so it makes sense for the government to extend and deepen its oversight of foreign investment,” said Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. “China will probably take umbrage but it needs to understand that Australia makes these decisions in its own interests.”

The U.S. remains Australia’s largest source of approved investment from overseas, comprising A$58.2 billion ($40.4 billion) — or 25% of the total — in the year ending June 2019. China comprised 5.7% of the total, valued at A$13.1 billion.

Under Australia’s current rules, state-owned enterprises already have zero-dollar screening threshold while most private investments under A$275 million, often for large land holdings, are waved through. The monetary thresholds have meant some investments that have raised national-security concerns have escaped screening.

Chinese purchases of agricultural land, including iconic properties such as the Cubbie Station in Queensland and the Van Diemen’s Land dairy in Tasmania, have proved particularly contentious in Australia.

Call in Powers

“The reforms will ensure that our foreign investment regime is able to respond to emerging risks and global developments,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said, labeling the changes the most significant in the area since 1975. The government will spend an additional A$54 million to bolster compliance and monitoring, he said.

After the changes, the treasurer will have power to “call in” an investment before, during or after an acquisition for review if it raises national security risks and has not captured by the “sensitive national security businesses” definition.

“Technology has been evolving and our geopolitical climate has become more complex,” Frydenberg told reporters on Friday. “In fact, the world over, governments are seeing foreign investment being used for strategic objectives, not purely commercial ones.”

While the treasurer will have the power order disposal of approved foreign investments where national security risks emerge post-approval, the last-resort power will not be retrospective.

As treasurer in 2016, Morrison ordered the Foreign Investment Review Board to step up scrutiny of foreign investment in state-owned infrastructure after a strategic port in Darwin used by the U.S. military was leased to a Chinese company. The prime minister on Friday ruled out the possibility of that sale, which at the time escaped the regulator’s scrutiny as it was managed by the Northern Territory government, being revoked.

Protecting Assets

Sandy Mak, partner and head of corporate at Corrs Chambers Westgarth, said she looked forward to seeing whether details in the draft legislation due for release next month would make a fundamental difference to existing rules, and which sectors would be classified.

“The government’s objective here is protect sensitive assets and you’d hope when the legislation comes out it will achieves that without stymieing investment in the types of sectors and businesses that need it most,” Mak said. “Anything oil and gas related for energy independence, anything telecommunications related, and anything defense related is definitely going to be top of their list,” she said, while data-related investments may also be targeted.

Before Australia’s calls for a probe into the origins of the coronavirus, its diplomatic ties with Beijing were already under stress. The government cited Beijing’s “meddling” into national affairs as a catalyst for its anti-foreign interference laws passed in 2018, the same year it banned Huawei Technologies Ltd. from helping build its 5G network.

FIRB Chairman David Irvine welcomed the new screening package, saying it “appropriately addresses increasing risks to the national interest whilst ensuring Australia remains welcoming and open to foreign investment.”

(Updates with Morrison comment on China in 5th paragraph.)

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Amazon Adds $2.75 Billion To Anthropic Investment, Sora Goes To Hollywood – Forbes

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Amazon invests $2.75 billion in Anthropic. This brings Amazon’s investment to $4 billion, as it follows its previous investment of $1.25 billion, which gave the company the option to invest the additional funds. This comes as Anthropic’s new Claude-3 chatbot outperforms ChatGPT- 4 in recent tests. Amazon has unique insight into Anthropic’s performance as it is one of the suite of AI models offered by AWS, which include most of Claude’s competitors.

Sora Goes To Hollywood. Everyone is reacting to a Bloomberg report that OpenAI will soon be meeting with studios and other Hollywood stakeholders to demonstrate the capabilities of the text-to-video generator and explore partnerships. OpenAI says unnamed “A list” directors are already using it.

Based in Toronto, shy kids are a multimedia production company who utilized Sora for the above short film about a man “who is literally filled with hot air.” His head, as you can see, is a yellow balloon. “We now have the ability to expand on stories we once thought impossible,” shares the trio made up of Walter Woodman, Sidney Leeder and Patrick Cederberg. Walter, who directed Air Head, said as great as Sora is at generating things that appear real, what excites us is its ability to make things that are totally surreal.

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Neuralink Shows Paralyzed Patient Playing Chess on a PC. Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company shared a video of its first human patient, Noland Arbaugh, playing chess and Civilization VI using their brain implant. Arbaugh, who is paralyzed below the shoulders, described the experience as “just stare somewhere on the screen” to move the cursor. While some experts see this as a promising step, others emphasize that it’s still early days and the technology has limitations. Arbaugh acknowledged that there’s still work to be done, but the implant has already changed his life.

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Illuvium Labs Raises an additional $12 million for NFT Gaming Universe. Following an extensive three-and-a-half-year development journey and $60 million in funding, Illuvium Labs is on the cusp of unveiling its interoperable gaming universe. It will feature three interconnected titles designed to utilize the same NFTs seamlessly across all games, promising a first-of-its-kind experience. The influx of $12 million in Series A funding from esteemed firms like King River Capital, Arrington and Animoca will be allocated to developing new gaming titles within the Illuvium ecosystem.

Databricks’ DBRX claims the crown as best open-source LLM. It’s a list that includes Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral’s Mixtral. Leading companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic sell, or rent, their proprietary private models to enterprises and subscribers. DBRX was produced for just $10 million, orders of magnitude less than its competitors. On Monday, Wired reported that the company showed data proving its AI model’s reading comprehension, answers to general knowledge questions, and coding is superior to other open-source models that can be downloaded from Hugging Face and modified by users.

Shiba-Inu Metaverse leader steps down amid dispute over IP. Marcie Jastrow, the well-regarded Hollywood executive who led Technicolor’s XR efforts, has left the company. This led the company’s legions, known as the Shib Army, to speculate about malfeasance, which is easy to do, because Jastrow is the only person involved who is not anonymous, including Ship’s charismatic leader Shytoshi Kusama.

This live football experience was built by Immersiv.io to showcase how AR can transform the live sports broadcast and fan experience using the Apple Vision Pro. Immersiv.io worked with the Bundesliga (the German Football League) on the production. In a post on X, the company said. “This is a 3D reproduction of the live game integrating TRACAB Gen 6 live skeletal data of all players and the ball, complemented with real-time insights, offering the ultimate live tactical perspective of the game.”

SXSW 2024: XR That Makes You Go Wow. The XR competition was won by an AI experience, The Golden Key. This is the second year in a row that an XR experience did not take the immersive festival’s grand prize.

The second annual AI Film Festival is coming to Los Angeles on May 1, and New York May 9. Seats are limited, request to attend at http://aiff.com

This column, once called “This Week in XR,” is also a podcast hosted by author Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Liz Hyman, CEO of the XR Association. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.

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Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? (Jaron Lanier/New Yorker)

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FP Answers: What is a 'behavioural edge' in investing and how does it affect returns? – Financial Post

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Temperament is the unsung hero of investing success

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By Julie Cazzin with Felix Narhi

Q: What is a “behavioural edge” in investing? How does it potentially enhance returns? How can an investor develop it? — Giovanni

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FP Answers: Giovanni, the term behavioural edge is just another way of saying “temperament,” which refers to the habitual way a person behaves in each situation. For example, one person may be easygoing and relaxed while another is more likely to be impatient and assertive.

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Temperament is the unsung hero of investing success. Gaining insight about our innate emotional temperament and learning how to work with it gives investors an edge.

The common misconception is that you need a high level of intelligence to be a successful investor. No doubt, that can be helpful, but based on many years in the industry, I’ve seen it is not always the most important differentiator.

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Once someone has at least an average level of intelligence, it is temperament that often provides the investing edge in leading to better returns over the long term. “Investing is not a business where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ,” famed investor Warren Buffett has pointed out.

Having the right temperament can potentially enhance investment returns in several ways. An investor who is very reactive to external events is likely to fare poorly over the long term because, quite simply, the world is full of uncertainty and always will be. Markets are highly reactive, abetted by algorithmic trading and automatic rebalancing by exchange-traded funds. Individual investors should not be.

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Research shows that investors who trade frequently or try to time the market underperform. On the other hand, those investors who can remain calm and patient throughout market cycles do better because markets historically trend upwards. Hands down, being calm, cool and collected is the right temperament for an investor to have.

The concept of “homo economicus” — or economic man — describes a hypothetical person who consistently makes rational decisions. In real life, our decisions are coloured by our formative experiences, moods, external circumstances, what we ate for lunch and a host of other factors. These influences drive our behaviours, but they often operate below conscious awareness (even artificial-intelligence apps “hallucinate”).

Given that behaviour is some combination of cognitive and emotional inputs, an investor can create an edge by developing a disciplined investment process that overrides temperament, especially during highly volatile periods.

The term “active patience” means being clear about your investment principles and what you are looking for, and practicing active patience until the right opportunity arises.

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In contrast, regular patience is making an investment decision and sticking with it no matter what, even if it was the wrong decision. The latter approach is unlikely to bring financial success, which is the major goal of investing.

Active patience is what Buffett would call the “fat pitch,” which occurs when the market (occasionally) presents a very attractive opportunity. It is easy to spot a great opportunity and take full advantage of it when an investor has clear principles on what they are looking for.

Can we change our temperament? Recent studies show that personality traits and moods are subject to change, sometimes within the hour, so temperament may not be as fixed as we’ve been led to believe.

Becoming a better investor starts with self-knowledge — and lots of practice. The behavioural traits associated with good investment outcomes are patience, discipline, emotional control and risk awareness. It so happens, these qualities lead to good life outcomes, too. A calm temperament is the bedrock of making sound investment decisions.

Every investor must determine for themselves how to achieve greater equanimity and there is no shortage of books, videos and TikTok tutorials on that evergreen topic. I would also add the importance of staying humble.

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In investing, as in life, the learning never stops. Staying open to new information and having the courage to challenge our own and others’ beliefs and habitual behaviours are the keys to future success.

Felix Narhi is chief investment officer and portfolio manager at PenderFund Capital Management Ltd.

Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the business news you need to know — add financialpost.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.

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Lenders Rally After India’s Central Bank Eases Investment Curbs – BNN Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — Indian banks and shadow lenders rose Thursday after the country’s central bank eased capital requirements for a unique type of investment, a move that may free up more funds for loans.

The gains came after the Reserve Bank of India issued Wednesday modified rules on lenders’ required provisions for exposure to alternative investment funds, or AIFs, that invest in the lenders’ borrowers. Under the new policy, a lender needs to set aside capital only for the amount the AIF invested in the debtor company, and not the entire investment of the lender in the AIF.

Shares of Piramal Enterprises Ltd., which reported among the biggest provisions for such investments, closed 1% higher after rising as much as 6% during the day. A gauge of financial services firms climbed 1%, the most since March 1.

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Lenders led the rally in the broader market, with the NSE Nifty 50 Index registering its best day since beginning of the month.

The RBI’s softening stance came after industry players raised concerns over clarity and uniformity after it announced in December restrictions on lenders’ exposure to AIFs that hold stakes in their borrowers. The latest move will likely help firms including Piramal, HDFC Bank Ltd. and IIFL Finance Ltd. reverse some of their relevant provisions made previously, according to analysts at Citigroup Inc. and Jefferies Financial Group Inc.

Read more: India’s Crackdown on Financial Risks Puts Industry on Watch

“Select private banks and NBFCs like Piramal had provided for their entire AIF exposure during 3Q and could see some write-backs in 4Q if they decide to reverse the excess provision,” Jefferies analyst Bhaskar Basu wrote in a note.

Regulators introduced a flurry of new rules last year to prevent a buildup of financial stress at a time when India’s economy remained resilient in the face of rising interest rates, slowing global growth and unabated geopolitical tensions.

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