亚洲AI股狂热：台韩散户杠杆风险警示全球市场

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. [music] Stock markets in South Korea and Taiwan have been on a wild ride lately. Record highs, sharp drops, [music] and dramatic swings in between.

Taiwan overtakes India as the fifth largest stock market in the world.

The Cosby about a month ago was down 8% two days in a row and then up 8% on the third day and then rallied to new highs. Especially been a roller coaster week for the Cosby in South Korea now down.

There's been plenty of volatility. [music] But if you zoom out, the bigger picture tells another story. Korea's Cosby index has nearly tripled over the past year and Taiwan's Thai has more than doubled. That kind of gains makes the US market looks like it's a standstill. Charlotte Yang covers Asian markets for Bloomberg. She says the rally comes down to one thing, AI. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions a year building out AI infrastructure.

And all of that runs on advanced chips and semiconductors. Many of them made in Korea and Taiwan. We're talking about companies like Taiwan's TSMC, that's the world's largest chief. And in Korea, the AD is laser focused on memory chips, SKHEX and Samsung. that really dominate this segment. The explosive demand for these chips has helped turn these firms into some of the most profitable in the world. And as these Asian chipmaker stocks kept climbing, retail investors piled in hoping to cash in on the rally.

They think that this is a one single generation rally and where's, you know, property so expensive, my salary is not keeping up, where's the inflation? Going into the stock market is my best way to make quick money. Retail [music] investors in both markets have always been active, but this time their behavior looks different. In Taiwan, many are borrowing heavily to buy more stocks. In Korea, some are turning to risky structured [music] products to boost returns.

Bloomberg opinion columnist Shulie Ren says it's this rapid buildup of leverage that's now raising alarm bells. until you sell your holdings. These are just [music] paper gains that can evaporate overnight. If the market suddenly turns, [music] you end up with nothing and possibly the capital came with a lot of leverage. The kind of wealth destruction that we could see, it could be tremendous, right? And those risks [music] may not stop with individual investors.

As markets grow more volatile and retail investors dive in [music] deeper, Charlotte says the consequences could spread further. I think today the markets are far more interconnected than before [music] and just looking at the sharp downturns the other day we saw with [music] Cosby. Cosby experienced a 10% drop and it's quickly filtered into Nikk into Chinese [music] market and ultimately into the US overnight session.

So I think that illustrates how a shocking Korea [music] or anywhere in Asia's tax sector can quickly ripple through and affect in US markets in way people [music] didn't anticipate before. This is the big take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Rebecca [music] Chung Wilkins in for WHA. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and [music] most powerful economies and the markets tycoons and businesses that drive this evershifting region.

[music]

Today on the show, how individual investors in Taiwan and Korea are rolling the [music] dice to try and cash in on the AI rally. What are the consequences for them and their economies? And if things go wrong, how far could the fallout spread? To see just how widespread Taiwan's investing frenzy has become, Bloomberg went to a small stir fry joint in Taipei, the island's capital city. The restaurant's called Pinsandra Chao, and lately it's become famous for something other than the food.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Hang was recently spotted having dinner there. They have like round tables with plastic stools. It's loud and a bit messy, but it's cheap and always. You can expect good food. Since then, it's become a meeting place for Taiwanese people who are interested in investing in the stock market. So, it was a Monday evening and the stock market that day actually sank earlier. [music] So, the benchmark index was down 3.5%.

But the mood there and the conversations people were having about the stocks were just still very upbeat. In one corner you there was excited chatter about AI and the market and whether they should be taking advantage of the day's decline and buy more stocks on the cheap. And in another corner you have a middle-aged man. You can hear him lecturing on his friends about the ins and outs of these PE ratios and how to use them to pick winners.

Bloomberg Charlotte Yang has spent weeks speaking to retail investors in Taiwan and she says stock trading has become a regular part of daily life there. The common phrase that come up in my conversation with them is that they say this has almost become like a national pastime or national movement. Charlotte says that's a real shift. Until recently, investing in the stock market was largely seen as something for finance professionals.

But close to half a million people have opened accounts to trade in the Taiwan stock market in the first half of this year. Many are investing for the first time, attracted by the prospect of getting rich quick. If you buy a thousand shares of TSMC over the past year, you just buy it and then you put it there. You'll be making $41,000. To put into context, that is more than double the median annual salary in Taiwan. And it's also more than the annual salary of many hardworking white collar office jobs.

Their big argument is [music] that this rally is really backed by the fundamentals and strong earnings delivery. So unlike the dotcom era which is dominated by companies with minimum revenues or [music] like some unproven business models this time the leaders of this AI rally like [music] TSMC, SKH, Samsung, they highly profitable with real technology edge and also [music] strong client demand that the supply capacity simply just cannot meet up with.

And so long as that continues [music] and the valuation is not expensive, the rally has more to go. That belief has helped push [music] stock investing to a fever pitch in Taiwan. For some investors, putting in just their savings isn't enough. They're borrowing money to buy even more stocks. Where's the market frenzy in full swing? People are really putting whatever idle cash they have into the stocks and also they're borrowing from brokers [music] in margin loans and also in unrestricted loans.

What that means is people would pledge their stock holdings and ETF holdings to get more cash. [music] They also turned to the borrowing from banks like in personal credit or in other type of loans. For many investors, borrowing to invest looks like a smart bet. Interest rates in Taiwan are low. And if stocks like TSMC keep delivering huge returns, investors figure they can easily cover the cost of a loan and still come out ahead.

So if you get bank loans, your annualized interest rates about 2 to 3%. And if you do a little bit of calculation like I put my money into TSMC or like the mainstream popular ETFs, I will be generating 50% return year to date. Over the past 12 months, margin loans or money investors borrow from brokerages to buy stocks have surged 160%. Last week, margin loans hit an all-time high, overtaking the previous record set just before the.com bubble burst in 2000.

Meanwhile, loans backed by stocks and ETFs, where investors pledged their portfolios as collateral, hit a record high in April. That's what worries some market watchers. Not just that stocks have risen so fast, but that more of the rally is being built on borrowed money and too much optimism. The biggest worry people have right now is what if you see a quick shift in global AI sentiment and because Taiwan's market and economy are so tied to AI, so tied to the tech industry, you have 80% of the benchmark ti

原文超出正文长度上限，此处截断——上游还有内容，完整版见上方「原文 ↗」。