Free Booze, Workations and Monsters in Your Sleep: Saturday Asia Briefing
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2023-08-26 13:50
Feeling sleepy? This week we join the work-from-anywhere junkies who juggle jetsetting with nocturnal conference calls, find monsters

Feeling sleepy? This week we join the work-from-anywhere junkies who juggle jetsetting with nocturnal conference calls, find monsters in our sleep, feel the lure of Hong Kong nightlife and look at why China is still struggling to rouse its stock market from a coma.

A flurry of new measures to bolster the world’s second-biggest stock market have fallen flat. Chinese stocks and the yuan are now close to their weakest levels in more than 15 years relative to their US peers as investors lose faith in Beijing’s ability to thwart deflation and revive the property market and consumer spending.

To see how China’s slowdown impacts countries around the world that hitched their wagon to the Asian powerhouse, take a look at what Latin America’s biggest economy is facing.

Pokémon Go made billions of dollars by getting people to go outside and hunt for virtual creatures. The mini monsters are now trying to get followers to go to bed, but are users already getting tired of Pokémon Sleep?

Sleep is also an issue for Therese-Heather Belen. She’s traveling across Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and India, and at the same time working at her New York-based job, attending video meetings during the night. Welcome to the world of the workation.

Belen isn’t the only one toiling in the shadow of the moon. A bumper crop of lunar missions are vying to put stuff on our celestial companion. Days after Russia’s Luna-25 crashed, India successfully set down its Chandrayaan-3 craft. Next, Japan hopes to send a rover, but things haven’t been going well for its space agency.

Nvidia’s exuberant earnings relaunched the AI frenzy this week, but a darker side of the technology is gaining attention. Deepfakes — realistic sounding and looking avatars — are beginning to cause havoc for everyone from banks to adult media stars.

All this volatility hasn’t served stock pickers well, reviving unflattering comparisons with dart-throwing monkeys. Part of the the problem for active investors, it turns out, is skewness.

Finally, how can Hong Kong bring back its glam nightlife and shopaholics? With free alcohol and longer hours of course.

Have a dreamy weekend.

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