Asia Financial Markets Forum

Our CEO Steven Okun was on stage at the Asia Financial Markets Forum, organised by Financial Markets Association of Singapore, breaking down what the US midterms mean for markets watching from Asia.

A Republican House is close to a done deal, he told the room, but the Senate is a real contest, and the bigger risk sits somewhere less obvious: a contested result, with local officials refusing to certify, tipping into a genuine constitutional crisis. That's the kind of unknown markets tend to punish hardest.

He also traced how quickly the politics of AI have shifted. It's not the technology facing resistance anymore, it's the data centres behind it, over land, power and water use. Singapore's likely next in line for that conversation.

The rest of the day echoed the same idea, whether the topic was Singapore's ambitions to deepen market liquidity or treasury teams overhauling how they hedge for a world with no reliable playbook left. 

The forum's theme, perma shocks, held up.