Section
Events
On the moments, cultural, financial, ceremonial, that mark the regional calendar.
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Events Essay
Cambodia got the cheaper forced-labour tariff. Singapore did not.
Washington began charging sixty economies on 24 July for failing to ban imports made with forced labour, at two rates two and a half points apart, and the thing separating the two is a signature rather than a factory.
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Events Essay
The Fed held rates but signalled a possible hike, and the firmer dollar is the part that lands on Southeast Asian margins
Nine of eighteen Fed officials now pencil in a 2026 hike and the median dot has climbed to 3.8 percent; for any Southeast Asian business with dollar costs or dollar debt, the firmer dollar arrives long before the rate does.
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Events Essay
ASEAN budgeted for a 26 percent tariff and closed at 19. The difference is sitting in your landed cost.
Southeast Asia braced for a tariff wall through early 2026 and finished the year exporting more to the United States than before it started; the relief is real, largely unpriced, and borrowed against a framework that is still half-built.
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Events Essay
A profitable coworking operator, marked down almost 18 percent on its SGX debut
JustCo runs 54 flexible-workspace centres across 12 cities and made under US$3 million last year; the Singapore Exchange marked it down almost 18 percent on debut, and it was not the only scale-first listing the market repriced this summer.
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Events Essay
The commission cap barely dents Grab’s revenue. The market still cut it a third.
Days after Indonesia’s 8 percent cap took effect, Barclays cut Grab’s target to $5 from $7 and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi left its board; the number that moved was a belief about who sets the take rate.
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Events Reportage
The tariff came back (yes, the Supreme Court killed the first one), and it lands on your invoice on July 24
In February the Supreme Court took the president’s emergency tariff away; by July 24 the Trade Representative means to have replaced it with a Section 301 version that has no expiry, and the first place it shows up is your landed cost.
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Events Essay
Vietnam just graduated to upper-middle-income. That is the bill, not the prize.
The World Bank moved Vietnam up a tier on 1 July, everyone cheered the growth rate, and the actual news is that the cheap-build advantage now has a visible expiry stamped on it.
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Events Essay
Two of the region’s biggest tech firms just had their margin set by a president
From 1 July, Grab and Gojek take 8 percent of an ojek fare instead of 20, because Prabowo asked them to in a room they could not say no in. The lesson for everyone whose model is a cut of someone else’s transaction is the same.
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Events Essay
Bank Indonesia hiked twice in nine days. Your prices moved too.
Bank Indonesia hiked twice in nine days to hold the rupiah up; for a Singapore operator with regional buyers, the decision is a quiet pricing signal, not foreign news.
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Events Essay
Two apps, one landlord (the merger might even help you, briefly)
Grab’s roughly US$7 billion move on GoTo is being read as a stock story and an antitrust story. For the merchant on the platform, it is a story about who owns the channel.
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Events Essay
The 1.4 million deleted accounts that won’t fix the thing they were deleted for
The June 4 disruption removed a million accounts and froze a few million dollars, and the durable casualty, the one no warrant reaches, is that everyone in a regional chat now half-assumes the other side is running a script.
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Events Essay
Singapore Grand Prix, without the conference (and a quarter of a million still buys the suite).
The eighteenth running of the night-race comes in 2026 without the Bloomberg New Economy Forum that used to bracket it. The suite economics still hold; the calendar arithmetic does not.