▲ AI PRISM* Personalized Economic Briefing
* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an artificial intelligence-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six tailored news items for each reader type.
[Key Issue Briefing]
■ Active ETF Expansion: Active strategy products are projected to grow from 12% of the global exchange-traded fund (ETF) market to 20% by 2030. Unlike passive products that simply track indexes, active ETFs can hold hard-to-access assets such as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and high-yield bonds, a key differentiating factor.
■ Fed Shift to Tightening: After Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh made clear his commitment to managing inflation at the Jackson Hole meeting and then followed through with an actual rate increase, Wall Street is preparing for the possibility of a new tightening cycle. Korea finds it difficult to delay a decision, caught between the need to defend its currency and guard against capital outflows, and the burden of household debt that has surpassed 2,000 trillion won (about $1.4 trillion).
■ China's Technology Pursuit: Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has begun mass production on a fifth-generation DRAM process, and China has secured 90% of commercial robot data, among a series of moves narrowing the technology gap. With volume offensives continuing in both commodity memory and robot training data, the price-defense capacity and technological edge of incumbent leaders are being tested.
[News of Interest to Global Investors]
1. "Global Active ETF Share to Rise to 20% by 2030"
- Key summary: Active ETFs, which account for about 12% of the global ETF market at $2.8 trillion, are projected to expand to 20%, or $6 trillion, by 2030. Philippe El-Asmar, head of ETFs for Asia-Pacific at JPMorgan, said in an interview with Seoul Economic Daily that active ETFs can pursue alpha returns above the index in exchange for relatively higher fees, and also cover a broader range of investable assets. As of the end of June this year, active ETFs accounted for $70 billion of Korea's $330 billion in ETF assets under management (AUM), or about 21%, ranking first in Asia-Pacific and second globally. He also said caution is needed on single-stock leveraged and inverse products given their volatility, drawing a line by noting that JPMorgan Asset Management has not launched such products and has no plans to do so.
2. Korea Caught in a Dilemma After Warsh Ends the Party
- Key summary: Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh revealed his hawkish leanings in a keynote address at the Jackson Hole meeting, speaking for 30 minutes across more than 3,500 words on his commitment to managing inflation. He reportedly sidestepped political pressure by calling U.S. President Donald Trump just before the rate increase to seek his understanding, citing the mood on the committee. Fed officials put their rate projections for the end of this year and next year side by side at 4.1% in the dot plot, but analysts say few experts are confident of a continued hold given the many uncertainties that could shake prices. Meanwhile, Korea needs defensive tightening given currency and capital outflow concerns, but its deliberations are deepening as household debt above 2,000 trillion won, mortgage rates that have topped 7% and next year's 821 trillion won budget converge.
- Key summary: Anthropic, which is preparing an initial public offering (IPO) this year, was described by the Financial Times of Britain as the fastest-growing company in history, but skepticism is growing among investors over its prospects for further growth. According to the FT, Anthropic's annualized revenue surged to $65 billion as of July this year and is expected to top $120 billion by the end of the year. However, after OpenAI released GPT-5.6 in July this year and won enterprise customers with aggressive pricing, it overtook Anthropic in weekly customer spending on OpenRouter for the first time in two and a half years, while low-cost open-source models from China's Moonshot AI and DeepSeek are also fueling price competition. With post-listing valuation forecasts sharply divided at between $1.5 trillion and $4 trillion, the listing has been pushed from October to November, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.
[Reference News for Global Investors]
- Key summary: Chinese memory chipmaker Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) officially declared the start of mass production on its G5 platform, a fifth-generation DRAM technology process. The company said potential dies per wafer for 8Gb products increased at least 50% from the fourth generation, but this compares total dies before defect screening and differs from yield, which determines actual shipments; the company did not disclose yield or monthly output. CXMT ranked fourth in global DRAM revenue share at 9.5% in the second quarter of this year, behind Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), SK hynix (000660.KS) and Micron, and its HBM3E, a fifth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM), is reported to have entered trial production. Citi, however, projected that global DRAM demand will grow 30% in 2027 and 35% in 2028, while supply growth will be limited to 19% and 22%, respectively.
5. MLCC ETFs Absent in Korea, Four Listed in the U.S. in a Month
- Key summary: Four ETFs tied to multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC), which support power stability at artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, have listed in the U.S. market in succession over the past month. Themes ETFs' PSOX came first, followed by Defiance's CAPA, Roundhill Investments' CCML and Global X's MLCC, with Samsung Electro-Mechanics (009150.KS) and Murata Manufacturing as core holdings; Samsung Electro-Mechanics carries the highest weighting at 21.55% in CAPA's underlying index. According to Kiwoom Securities (039490.KS), MLCC content per graphics processing unit (GPU) is estimated to rise from about 200 units for Nvidia's H100 to 500 for the B200, 1,500 for the GB200 and about 5,000 for the next-generation Rubin, while the MLCC market for AI servers is projected to grow from $1.3 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2030. In addition, with customer certification taking two to three years and mass production on new lines taking 12 to 24 months, supply bottlenecks are being read as an investment opportunity.
- Key summary: Fourteen months after China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a humanoid robot development road map in October 2023, 22 innovation centers have opened across the country. That is an unusually fast pace considering it took two to three years for the first center to launch in the electric vehicle and semiconductor sectors, but concerns about overinvestment are also being raised as demand for data sales is not sufficient. According to U.S. data-labeling firm Scale AI, China accounts for about 90% of commercially available robot AI data, and its data production costs are 60% lower than in the U.S. Chen Tao, director of the Deep Learning Research Institute at Fudan University, stressed that the biggest problem with current robot vision-language-action (VLA) models is an abundance of success data and a shortage of failure data, and that true self-evolution requires correcting errors independently and converting them into experience.
▶Go to article: Korea Caught in a Dilemma After Warsh Ends the Party
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