The request came during his visit to Egat’s offices on Thursday (January 9), where he was briefed on current performance.

He said he believed that the authority, given its sound financial state, will be able to keep household power bills at the same level.

He also urged Egat to hasten investments this year.

Energy Minister Sontirat Sontijirawong agreed to move quickly with the relevant state agencies in finding ways to lower electricity bills for small and medium-sized enterprises and for low-income earners.

He said he would meet Egat and PTT executives on Friday and urge them to take advantage of the baht’s current strength against other currencies by accelerating their investments.

Egat governor Viboon Rerksilathai said Egat would spend Bt600 billion on multiple projects this year and into 2024.

Most involve the continuing installation of power transmission lines.

It also wants to build eight power plants at cost of Bt300 billion to generate a combined 5,400 megawatts a day, he said.

The plants are due for Cabinet consideration soon, with construction expected to begin in 2022.

PTT president Chansin Treenuchagron said PTT had already accelerated investments in existing projects in order to cash in on the baht’s high value.

On Dec. 30, Ghosn made a stealthy exit from Japan, where he was under house arrest facing trial on four charges of financial misconduct during his tenure as chairman of auto company Nissan. He suddenly showed up in Lebanon, sending shock waves throughout Japan as officials scrambled to understand how he had escaped.

Ghosn said the procedures after his arrest in Japan in November 2018 were “anachronistic and inhumane.” He said he was held for 130 days in solitary confinement in a tiny cell, allowed outside for only half an hour a day on weekdays. He said his interrogations extended into the night, sometimes reaching eight hours and in the absence of a lawyer, with lights left on round-the-clock.

“It’s not very difficult to come to the conclusion that you’re going to die in Japan or you have to get out,” he said Wednesday during a news conference in Beirut, his first public appearance since his escape. He insisted that he was innocent and the target of a conspiracy to bring him down, and called Japan’s justice system corrupt.

Japanese Justice Minister Masako Mori responded that Ghosn was spreading false information about the country’s justice system and that his audacious escape could itself be a crime.

Ghosn appeared at a hearing in Lebanon on Thursday, two days after Lebanon’s caretaker justice minister, Albert Serhan, said the country’s public prosecutor had received the Interpol red notice about Ghosn and would be taking the necessary steps. He was placed under house arrest.

A few days after his arrival in Lebanon’s capital, Ghosn found himself in more legal trouble: A group of lawyers last Thursday lodged a legal complaint against him for visiting Israel as chairman of Renault and later Nissan. Lebanon and Israel have been in a state of war for the past six decades, and Lebanese law considers interacting with Lebanon’s southern neighbor and sworn enemy a crime.

Ali Abbas, one of the two lawyers who filed the Israel-related complaint against Ghosn, said the travel ban was a formality that usually comes after receiving Interpol notices, especially red notices, which alerts police about internationally wanted fugitives but does not compel any country to arrest the fugitive.

The Lebanese lawyer said evidence of Ghosn’s dealings in Israel were in a legal memorandum he submitted, including a contract signed in 2015 that came into effect in 2017.

Abbas said that he and his colleague filed the complaint because no one should be above the law and that all nationals should be treated equally before the judiciary, regardless of economic class or social standing. It’s an issue that Lebanon grapples with – “wasta,” a mix of nepotism and connections, frequently helps some people avoid legal complications.

Abbas also said different rules should not apply for those fortunate enough to possess multiple passports. The court said Thursday that it is continuing investigations into Ghosn’s Israeli connections.

Ghosn is a Lebanese, French and Brazilian national, and was asked to surrender his passports to his lawyers under the terms of his bail in Japan. But he was allowed to keep a spare French passport at his home in a locked case, the keys of which were held by his lawyers. His lawyers maintain that they did not assist in and were not aware of his escape.

During Wednesday’s news conference, Ghosn said the allegations against him in Japan were “untrue, and I should never have been arrested in the first place.” He claimed collusion between Nissan and Japanese prosecutors to edge him out to prevent closer relations between Nissan and French partner Renault.

Ghosn was charged with underreporting his income and diverting company funds for his own use. He said that not only had the income never been paid but that the final amount had not even been decided.

Speaking in a packed conference room from Beirut, Ghosn said he was happy to be in Lebanon.

“I don’t consider myself a prisoner,” he said. “I prefer this prison to the one I was in.”

On Wednesday, Marc Demane Debih, a failed Swiss entrepreneur, revealed to a New York jury the secret methods he used to earn $70 million in illegal profit from a global insider-trading network. Testifying for U.S. prosecutors, he is the government’s star witness in the trial of Telemaque Lavidas, the first to face a U.S. jury after a multiyear government probe of a wider alleged conspiracy.

“We agree (with) each other to share inside information and rumors,” Demane Debih said about his relationship with one member of the network. “If he got inside information, he would give it to me. I would trade it for him.”

Demane Debih has been jailed since his 2018 arrest in Serbia and pleaded guilty in October to 38 insider-trading charges. Prosecutors say he was a key player in a sprawling network of contacts on three continents that shared information about pending corporate takeovers and paid off tipsters — from executives to bankers to an art collector.

The 49-year-old Demane Debih, who has agreed to cooperate with authorities to reduce his sentence, testified that Lavidas’ tips helped produce profit on shares of Boston-based Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Lavidas got inside information from his father, who was an Ariad board member at the time, and passed it along to Georgios Nikas, a Greek businessman who owned restaurants in New York, according to prosecutors. Demane Debih, who described Nikas as a friend, said he never got tips directly from Lavidas.

The secret Ariad information stood out from the other tips he got from investment bankers because it came “from somebody who worked there — in this case a board member,” Demane Debih told jurors on Wednesday.

In addition to Nikas, Demane Debih testified he got leaks from John Dodelande, a French art collector connected to investment bankers. Dodelande sometimes provided him with stolen deal documents and shared information about more than 15 transactions in all, Demane Debih said. He concluded Dodelande’s sources probably worked for Moelis & Co. and Centerview Partners.

Benjamin Taylor, a former Moelis banker, and Darina Windsor, formerly of Centerview Partners, were charged by the U.S. in October. Taylor and Windsor shared a London apartment, sometimes communicating in code and using the pet names “Pops” and “Popsy” in emails, according to the government. They’re charged with providing inside information on 22 companies.

Taylor and Windsor haven’t appeared in court to face the charges. Prosecutors said Taylor is in France and Windsor in Thailand. Dodelande didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

On Tuesday, former Goldman Sachs investment banker Bryan Cohen pleaded guilty to passing confidential information to Demane Debih. Nikas, who faces insider-trading charges, is in Greece and considered a fugitive by the U.S. Lavidas’s father, Athanase Lavidas, hasn’t been charged.

Demane Debih said he got into stock trading about 14 years ago after failed stints at importing coffee, selling cigarettes and trying to bring foreign businesses to Serbia. A diamond business he financed with a partner fell apart after only a couple of months. He used $3 million he got from the sale of a family boat and from an inheritance to fund his initial trading activities.

After trading stocks for a few years, Demane Debih testified that he moved to London from Geneva to find his own sources of information, getting his first tip from a JPMorgan Chase investment banker. He also described how he got details about pending takeovers involving three mining companies from an unwitting girlfriend who worked at Goldman Sachs.

During one four-year period of insider trading he lived in Switzerland, Greece, the U.K., France, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. As part of his guilty plea, he agreed to forfeit about $49 million.

He told jurors he learned early on to disguise illegal trades by using other people to make share purchases, buying other stocks in the same sector as the target stock and selling off part of a profitable position before an expected share move. He later came to insist that insider-trading contacts communicate with him in person or on burner phones.

Demane Debih said he took steps to hide the flow of payments from authorities, sometimes paying off tipsters from a cash-filled safe in his apartment. Phony invoices for artworks helped obscure payments to Dodelande, whom he said he paid more than $12 million. Other payments were made to and from companies set up to hide the source of payments. He told jurors that he sometimes used illegal tips to plant stories with financial news outlets, including Bloomberg News, then profited when the stories moved share prices.

Demane Debih said he met Telemaque Lavidas once, at a 2011 birthday dinner for a friend of Nikas. Sometime after the dinner, Demane Debih claims, Nikas told him he had access to information about Ariad from Lavidas’s father.

On cross-examination, defense lawyer Jonathan Streeter worked to minimize the connection between Lavidas, who lives in New York, and Demane Debih. The trader answered “no sir” to a series of questions establishing that he hadn’t ever seen Lavidas after that first meeting and never met his father, whose name he didn’t know.

He never witnessed either Lavidas providing insider information, he said.

Streeter suggested that Demane Debih, who faces many years in prison, is lying about Lavidas to reduce his own sentence. He told jurors in his opening statement Monday that Windsor, the former Centerview Partners banker, was the source of Nikas’s Ariad information, not his client.

Since 2013, American prosecutors, working with other countries, have investigated an alleged web of insider-trading that includes residents of the U.S., U.K., France, Switzerland, Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Hong Kong. The participants allegedly used secret information to profit from mergers, regulatory moves and other market-moving actions involving pharmaceutical companies.

Demane Debih told jurors that a Turkish-Swiss contact in Geneva passed along a rumor in 2013 that Ariad was going to be acquired and taken private. He testified that he ran the scenario by Nikas, because he knew Nikas had access to Lavidas. Nikas told him there was nothing to the rumor.

Demane Debih said he “strongly advised” his Geneva contact to sell his position. “I told him I had a very good source,” the trader said. “It was not the time to be long on the stock. It was time to be short on the stock. He was very happy. I saved him a huge loss on this position.”

The case is U.S. v. Lavidas, 19-cr-716, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said U.S. monetary policy is “in a good place” amid solid growth while there is a risk that inflation continues to miss the central bank’s 2% target.

The vice chairman said Thursday that the Federal Open Market Committee’s baseline view is that core inflation rises back to the central bank’s 2% target following three interest rate cuts in 2019, which in his view were put in place partly to offset surprisingly strong global disinflationary headwinds.

U.S. central bankers forecast last month that inflation minus food and energy would rise to 2% in 2021. That measure stood at 1.6% in November.

“If there is a risk to that outlook, it is skewed to the downside,” Clarida said in a question and answer period following his opening remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations. “We need to be nimble and we need to be alert not only to U.S. but global circumstances.”

Clarida said monetary policy is “in a good place” and should continue to support sustained growth, a strong labor market, and inflation running close to 2%.

“If developments emerge that, in the future, trigger a material reassessment of our outlook, we will respond accordingly.”

His remarks on downside risks to inflation, however, suggest that the committee is giving that indicator some weight as it assesses the need to change policy in the future.

Clarida suggested the committee wants to give the rate cuts time to work through to inflation expectations and actual prices.

“The global disinflationary pressures which I referred to are very powerful forces and policy needs to factor that in, in setting policy to get inflation up to the objective,” he said in the question and answer period. Even so, “we do think that policy is appropriate, and, under our baseline outlook, will continue to be appropriate.”

Fed officials left interest rates unchanged in a range of 1.5% to 1.75% at their final meeting of 2019. They also signaled policy would be on hold through 2020, keeping the central bank on the sidelines during a U.S. presidential election year.

Investors see almost no chance of a rate cut in the next six months, according to pricing in federal funds futures contracts.

Minutes of the Dec. 10-11 meeting released Jan. 3 showed officials still see some downside risks to their outlook for continued growth and were prepared to move rates up or down if there was a “material” change in their forecasts. “There are some indications that headwinds to global growth may be beginning to abate,” Clarida said.

“The U.S. economy begins the year 2020 in a good place,” he said. “The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, inflation is close to our 2% objective, gross domestic product growth is solid.”

The release of the minutes last week coincided with news of a U.S. air strike that killed a top Iranian general.

Oil prices rose in anticipation of retaliation by Tehran but have since fallen back, reassured by the restraint shown so far by both sides. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Iran was “standing down” from the confrontation.

Clarida is leading the Fed’s review of monetary policy strategy, tools and communications policy. In December, Fed officials discussed feedback from their listening sessions with community and business leaders around the country. He said conclusions from the review will be shared with the public “later this year.”

Moody’s has published an outlook report titled “Sovereigns – Asia Pacific: 2020 outlook negative as slower growth amplifies long-standing fiscal, liquidity and demographic challenges”.

A gradual slowdown in growth globally, exacerbated by trade tensions between China (A1 stable) and the US (Aaa stable) — notwithstanding the phase one trade deal — will constrain the credit quality of rated sovereigns in Asia Pacific, the report said.

“Despite the phase one deal, the prospect of the US and China agreeing on long-term issues like industrial policy, intellectual property and market access remains highly uncertain. As a result, the US-China trade relationship will remain a source of uncertainty and volatility in 2020,” says Martin Petch, Moody’s vice president and senior credit officer.

These trade frictions will spread via global supply chains, and Asia Pacific sovereigns embedded in global supply chains such as Hong Kong (Aa2 negative), South Korea (Aa2 stable), Malaysia (A3 stable), Singapore (Aaa stable) and Thailand (Baa1 positive), along with Vietnam (Ba3 negative) to a degree, will be impacted as a result, the report said.

Weakening trade is also curbing investment, which if sustained, will further reduce potential growth and amplify long-standing structural challenges including fiscal vulnerabilities and demographic change, the report added.

“In APAC [Asia Pacific], trade tensions are no longer simply exacerbating the global slowdown in trade volumes. The shock is now also extending to investment, with businesses putting off their expansion plans amid economic, political and policy uncertainties, which will hurt income growth, competitiveness and productivity in the long run,” adds Petch.

On average across Asia Pacific, Moody’s forecasts gross domestic product growth of 4.0 per cent in 2019-21, slower than 4.4 per cent over 2014-18, but still robust by global standards.

The erosion of fiscal positions as governments try to buffer against external and domestic growth shocks will be a risk for some sovereigns.

For governments such as India (Baa2 negative), China, Pakistan (B3 stable) and Sri Lanka (B2 stable), slower growth prospects will increase restrictions on fiscal space, further limiting the capacity of the authorities to support their economies.

A few, including Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore, have much more fiscal flexibility.

In addition, weaker growth will compound structural challenges in the region, which range from rapid ageing, to creating enough jobs for large and growing young populations in places like the Philippines (Baa2 stable), Indonesia (Baa2 stable) and Malaysia, the report said.

Amid heightened unpredictability, Asia Pacific’s frontier markets are vulnerable to any sudden shift in investor appetite.

Nineteen of Moody’s 25 rated Asia Pacific sovereigns have stable outlooks, while four have negative outlooks and two have positive outlooks.