
Canada rescinds digital services tax in bid to advance trade talks with US
Canada has rescinded its digital services tax targeting United States technology firms in a bid to advance trade negotiations with the US, Canada's finance ministry said in a statement on Sunday (Jun 29), days after US President Donald Trump called off trade talks.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump will resume trade negotiations in order to agree on a deal by Jul 21, 2025, the ministry said.
On Friday, Trump abruptly cut off trade talks with Canada over its tax targeting US technology firms, saying that it was a "blatant attack" and that he would set a new tariff rate on Canadian goods within the next week.
The tax was 3 per cent of the digital services revenue a firm takes in from Canadian users above US$20 million in a calendar year and payments will be retroactive to 2022.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


CNA
36 minutes ago
- CNA
Indonesia trade surplus seen widening to $2.53 billion in May: Reuters poll
JAKARTA :Indonesia's trade surplus in May is expected to widen to $2.53 billion as growth of imports is expected to drop from a double-digit rise in the previous month, while exports continued to rise, a Reuters poll showed on Monday. Analysts in the poll estimated the rise in imports for May at 0.9 per cent, which would be the weakest growth in four months from February. Imports was up 21.84 per cent in April. Growth of exports was expected at 0.4 per cent, lower than the 5.76 per cent recorded in April. Southeast Asia's biggest economy has been enjoying monthly trade surpluses since mid-2020, mainly supported by a commodity boom, but it has been shrinking gradually amid weaker global demand. The poll's surplus for May was lower than the estimate from Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati at $4.9 billion of trade surplus, which would be the country's biggest monthly surplus in more than two years. On Tuesday, the statistics bureau will also announce Indonesia's consumer price index data for the June period as well as foreign arrivals data in May.

Straits Times
42 minutes ago
- Straits Times
Altcoins, once seen as rivals to Bitcoin, suffer $382 billion crypto wipeout
Most of the so-called altcoins – the catch-all term for all digital assets outside of Bitcoin and stablecoins - are nursing steep declines. PHOTO: REUTERS New York – On the face of it, 2025 looks like a banner year for crypto: Bitcoin hitting a record, an industry-boosting US president whose family is venturing headlong into the sector, and key legislation widely expected to be passed by the US Congress. But look beyond the bullish headlines and the rally in Bitcoin, and a vastly different landscape comes into view. Most of the so-called altcoins – the catch-all term for all digital assets outside of Bitcoin and stablecoins - once touted as competitors to the original cryptoasset are nursing steep declines, with more than US$300 billion (S$382.9 billion) of market value wiped out so far in 2025. The sea of red points to a wider malaise that's forcing parts of the industry to confront existential questions. Crypto was imagined by early enthusiasts as a universe where a host of coins competed for investor money, offering a diverse set of use cases. But as Bitcoin reigns supreme, that's giving way to predictions that large swathes of the sector will become a digital wasteland. 'I think they're just going to die, frankly,' Nick Philpott, co-founder of trading platform Zodia Markets, said of altcoins. 'They'll just wither away. Technically, a lot of this stuff will just sit there and gather dust in perpetuity.' Bitcoin's share of the total market value of cryptoassets has climbed by nine percentage points this year to 64 per cent, the highest since January 2021, according to CoinMarketCap. Back then, cryptocurrencies were a largely unregulated space, crypto lending was roaring with few safeguards and nonfungible tokens were just starting to take off. In sharp contrast, altcoins are faltering. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets, which more than doubled in the aftermath of Donald Trump's Nov 5 election victory, has since given up all those gains and is down around 50 per cent in 2025. With Bitcoin soaking up the bulk of capital flows from investors in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), other parts of the market are increasingly left behind. Even Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, remains about 50 per cent below its all-time high after a modest rebound fueled by inflows to spot ETFs investing in the token. 'Historically, Bitcoin's moved and then that's passed down into altcoins,' said Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute. 'We've not really seen that yet this cycle.' Crypto is no stranger to mass extinction events. The 2022 market crash, punctuated by the implosions of algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD and Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange, led to the demise of hundreds of projects. Thousands of coins still exist on their blockchains, with little or no activity – relegated to the status of 'ghost chains' in crypto parlance. What's different this time is that crypto is becoming a more regulated, institutionally-driven marketplace, and that stablecoins appear to be the only tokens with a real shot at achieving means-of-payment status, due to the fact that they eliminate volatility. In the past year alone, the market value of stablecoins has swelled by US$47 billion, and some of the world's largest banks are entering the field. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that is studying a potential stablecoin. That's putting pressure on altcoin projects to find ways to shore up their status and appeal to a wider base of investors. 'I've talked to a couple of projects that have been thinking about merging foundations, putting it up for governance, saying, 'Hey, we can now be governed under this other authority' – that authority being another altcoin community,' said Kanyi Maqubela, managing partner at venture capital firm Kindred Ventures. The shifting tides are also reflected in corporate behaviour. Modeled on Michael Saylor's Strategy, a new breed of Bitcoin accumulators has emerged. In April, a special-purpose acquisition company affiliated with Cantor Fitzgerald partnered with Tether Holdings and SoftBank to launch Twenty One Capital, seeded with nearly US$4 billion in Bitcoin. The Trump family, which is also getting involved in Bitcoin mining, has raised US$2.3 billion via Trump Media & Technology Group to create a Bitcoin treasury. While similar vehicles have been set up recently to accumulate smaller tokens like Ether, Solana and BNB, they are much smaller. Glimmers of hope Not all altcoins are floundering. Tokens like Maker and Hyperliquid that are linked to thriving decentralized-finance protocols have notched big gains this year. 'There's certainly a subset of the market doing incredibly well – generally companies with real businesses, real revenues, and those revenues are being used to buy back tokens,' said Jeff Dorman, chief investment officer of digital asset investment firm Arca. There's also the prospect of more favourable regulations. The potential for US Securities and Exchange Commission approval of ETFs backed by coins like Solana are stirring hopes of wider adoption. Another possible catalyst is the Digital Asset Market Clarity (Clarity) Act, informally referred to as crypto's market structure bill. The Clarity Act aims to provide a comprehensive regulatory framework, including delineating responsibilities between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the SEC. 'The Clarity Act has the potential to do for altcoins what ETFs did for Bitcoin and Ethereum: provide the regulatory legitimacy that unlocks real institutional capital,' said Ira Auerbach, a senior executive at Offchain Labs. Yet according to Kindred Venture's Mr Maqubela, the issue ultimately boils down to utility. He compares Bitcoin to gold and Ether to copper – the former has a capped final supply and the latter's blockchain underpins much of crypto's functionality – and says most altcoins are stuck in a sort of twilight zone, underpinned by big promises and not much else. 'I think a lot of them are going to whittle down to zero because they were driven by speculation without that mimetic value like Bitcoin, and they tried to be utilitarian without achieving any real scale,' he said. BLOOMBERG Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Business Times
an hour ago
- Business Times
China shows off tech resilience in face of trump export controls
[BEIJING] As Donald Trump brandishes US export controls on technology as a bargaining chip to wrest supplies of rare earth magnets from Beijing, China is showcasing what it can do without the most advanced American semiconductors. On a government-organised trip this month to Jiangsu and Zhejiang, two of China's richest provinces that spawned artificial intelligence (AI) darling DeepSeek, authorities lined up a host of executives from technology companies to meet with journalists from Bloomberg News and other media outlets. The message was ultimately one of defiance: China's technology sector still aims at world dominance despite US curbs. Take Magiclab Robotics Technology, a firm in the eastern city of Suzhou, founded barely more than a year ago. Its president, Wu Changzheng, said it had independently developed more than 90 per cent of the parts it uses to make humanoid robots. The rest consists of semiconductors and microcontroller units procured domestically and overseas, he said, adding that they do not use US chips. 'China doesn't have many weak links in this industry,' Wu said, as he demonstrated a human-sized robot destined for factory floors. He brushed off Trump's recent ban on US firms exporting semiconductor design software to China, saying his robots only require 'standard chips'. Other entrepreneurs emphasised self-reliance over the five-day trip with companies spanning bio-pharmaceuticals, humanoid robotics, AI and autos – all sectors pivotal to President Xi Jinping's manufacturing ambitions. Many in China's business sector have rallied around Xi's government in the face of Trump's tariffs and expanding US export curbs. Access to so many executives at once is typically difficult for foreign journalists in a country where media access is tightly regulated and company officials can be reluctant to speak freely for fear of reprisal. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up The trip exemplifies Beijing's desire to boost global investor confidence in its US$19 trillion economy, which has been plagued by a property crash, deflation and now the US's highest tariffs in a century. Although DeepSeek's surprise AI breakthrough earlier this year proved China can innovate with a limited supply of chips, Beijing still faces difficulty catching the US while being denied access to Nvidia's most advanced semiconductors. On the press tour, the Chinese government mostly presented firms that do not require top-tier chips, such as AISpeech, which makes in-car AI-powered audio and video tools. For companies pioneering autonomous driving models or artificial general intelligence systems that possess human-level cognitive abilities, accessing the latest chips is likely to be far more important. Tiptoeing around sensitive topics such as state subsidies, eight tech executives who addressed reporters throughout the trip downplayed the impact of a yearslong US campaign to curtail China's technological ascent, emphasising the country's increased self-reliance as government officials listened attentively on the sidelines. The executives spoke about how they are instead leveraging local advantages they consider disruption-proof, from a vast talent pool to supply chains walled off from the outside world. Yu Kai, AISpeech's co-founder and chief scientific officer, said the company has hired more than 700 people in research centres in Beijing and Suzhou, after starting off with fewer than 10 people developing an algorithm in Cambridge. It has set up a subsidiary in Shenzhen for its proximity to smart equipment manufacturing and also runs a unit in southern China to produce software for cars built by a local auto-making partner. Illustrating the deep concern in Beijing on US tech controls, Xi has restricted China's rare earth magnets in recent months in a bid to unwind some of Trump's recent export curbs. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last week that the US and China signed a document to codify trade terms reached last month in Geneva, including a commitment from Beijing to deliver rare earths used in everything from wind turbines to jet planes. China's economic stamina was a common theme of the trip that began in Nanjing, a city in Jiangsu, where researchers publish three times more scientific papers than those in New York. Ferried by two buses, dozens of journalists went to Suzhou and neighbouring Zhejiang province by high-speed train, as the focus of discussions shifted more to the development of green technologies. There's debate in China over how it matters to access state-of-the-art chipmaking machines and Nvidia's most advanced AI accelerators. Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei Technologies, recently said Chinese firms can adopt means such as chip stacking to get results similar to the most cutting-edge semiconductors. Beijing also blocks most AI services from US rivals, meaning domestic players do not have to compete against American leaders. China has to put on a display of 'confidence and window dressing' after years of tech curbs, according to Julian Mueller-Kaler, director of the Strategic Foresight Hub at the Stimson Center in Washington. High-end chips for AI data centres, for example, can be replaced with less capable models, at the expense of more energy usage, he said. 'The reason the Chinese didn't really retaliate that much after the chips restrictions a few years ago is Beijing actually likes them, to a certain degree,' he said. 'It forces Chinese companies to develop their own capabilities and reduce the reliance on American tech – a political goal Chinese decision-makers had for a long time but was hindered by economic realities.' Still, for all the savvy on display, few companies will emerge unscathed from deteriorating ties with the US. Some executives on the trip mentioned they were feeling the pain as Trump's America First policy seeks to limit US investment in China's high-tech sectors. 'The impact on financing is significant,' said Zhang Jinhua, chairwoman of Iaso Biotechnology, which makes a life-saving cancer treatment. 'I tell my team to stop asking when this winter ends. We must treat winter as the four seasons and adapt to prolonged uncertainty.' BLOOMBERG