Transcription
[CC may contain inaccuracies]
Isabel. Clearly there's a degree of vulnerability and question marks over the longevity of the issue. But government and for, you know, ability and mandate for policy making. Right? What are we hearing at the moment?
Right. Well, as usual, I mean, the prime minister gave his initial press conference last night and laid out some new policies. But as you say, there is a question mark over whether he will actually be able to pass those policies. In the past, it was the LDP policy or the coalition policy was basically the government policy because of the majority they had in parliament for so long.
But now that they don't have that, they will have to discuss every single bill with the minority parties and try to get their support to get them through. So everything is going to take a lot longer. There's going to be a lot more uncertainty over what happens. And that all plays, of course, into the issue of, you know, if he gets to meet Donald Trump next week, as he is hoping to do, we understand how seriously will Donald Trump take him if he's someone who is vulnerable to a no confidence vote motion at any point who could be sort of felled by opponents from within his own party if things are not going well?
So it's a bit of a limp sort of start for this new administration.
Well, we did hear from Ishiba saying that he's announcing a new package for semiconductors and artificial intelligence. So what are the details we know about that?
Yes. Well, he did try to lay out this new policy. He obviously doesn't want to lose momentum on things like AI and semiconductors. Obviously, the government has already paid out 4 trillion and allocated ¥4 trillion for these kinds of subsidies for companies like TSMC to build plants here and also for the sort of domestic efforts to build some semiconductor plants in Japan.
So this is a whole new sum. We think it's probably coming on top of the previous sum. But as I mentioned earlier, this is going to be a very long and even more complicated process than before. I mean, in the past, when you saw these figures, you might think, well, how much of that is actual cash? How much is it going to be sort of loans that are made available? Those details would come out in following days.
But now we've got the added complication of how much will the opposition parties agree to and whose agreement can he get to pass this package through. So there's a lot of doubt over that. We are hearing that there will be further discussions this afternoon about it. But there's a lot still to learn about that package.