Sending money across a Southeast Asian border has long been slower and dearer than sending it across the world’s major financial centres. A regional project now moving from design into deployment is meant to fix that, and it does so with an architectural choice worth understanding. Hub and spoke, not a web of bilaterals Central…

Japanese monetary policy has spent most of this century as a study in immobility. That has ended. In June 2026 the Bank of Japan raised its policy rate to 1 per cent, the highest level in more than thirty years, then held at that level at its July meeting. Neither move stopped the yen from…

For more than two decades, ASEAN and China have been negotiating a set of rules for the South China Sea. In 2023 the two sides adopted guidelines promising to finish the job within three years, putting the deadline in July 2026. That date has passed without a document. The Philippines, this year’s ASEAN chair, is…

Generative AI produced content, and the legal questions concerned that content: who owns it, whether it infringes, whether the training data was lawfully obtained. Agentic AI does things. It books, orders, negotiates, executes. The legal questions change accordingly, and Singapore is among the first jurisdictions to address them in a published framework. What was issued…

Singapore has managed its data centre sector through policy instruments — moratoria, capacity allocation exercises, sustainability standards attached to approvals. The draft Digital Infrastructure Bill would put that oversight on a statutory footing and extend it to cloud services. The Ministry of Digital Development and Information and the Infocomm Media Development Authority opened public consultation…

Singapore has changed the rules of corporate control. The amendments to the Singapore Code on Take-overs and Mergers, announced by the Monetary Authority of Singapore in June on the advice of the Securities Industry Council, took effect on 16 July 2026. They follow a public consultation the Council opened in May 2025. What moved Area…

The assumption that Asia supplies abundant, inexpensive labour is expiring. It is expiring at different speeds in different countries, and that divergence is becoming a business planning variable. The demographic position The International Labour Organization’s April 2026 brief on demographic shifts in Asia and the Pacific sets out a region at the leading edge of…

Indonesia is making two significant regulatory changes at once, and firms operating there have until the end of October to prepare for the larger of them. The Manpower Law On 14 July 2026, Indonesia’s House of Representatives confirmed that Commission IX is fast-tracking deliberation of a new Manpower Law. It would be the most significant…

The most likely mechanism for disrupting trade around Taiwan is not a naval blockade. It is an underwriting committee declining to renew cover. What changed in July China’s Coast Guard announced on 4 July 2026 that a task group led by the cutter Xiushan would continue patrols east of Taiwan. At least two China Coast…

Southeast Asia has been discussing a regional power grid since the 1990s. The International Energy Agency’s Southeast Asia Energy Outlook 2026 records that the discussion has finally become construction, and in the same breath sets out why the schedule is in trouble. From memorandum to infrastructure The ASEAN Power Grid is moving from strategic planning…