Taiwan's top financial regulator Peng prepared for US election outcome

By Faith Hung and Emily Chan

TAIPEI (Reuters) -The chairman of Taiwan's top financial regulator said his agency has contingency plans for any possible outcome of the U.S. presidential election, regardless of whether it is Donald Trump or Kamala Harris who prevails. "We definitely have plans in place," Jin-lung Peng, the chairman of Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday, but declined to give details.

"We pay close attention to changes in the capital markets," he said, adding that "Whenever we set strategy, we have to consider international geopolitical and political risks."

Taiwan's stock market and the shares of its most well-known company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), rose to records earlier this month. However, markets have dropped since Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump accused Taiwan of stealing America's semiconductor business and suggested it should pay the U.S. for its defence support in an interview.

Market sentiment that Trump would win back the White House surged earlier this month after an attempted assassination and his formal nomination but U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democrat nominee, has closed the gap with him in recent polls.

SEMICONDUCTOR SECTOR This year's rally in Taiwan's market, among the strongest in Asia, has been buoyed mostly by TSMC, a major supplier of tech giants like Apple Inc and Nvidia, as well as other semiconductor shares riding on the global artificial intelligence (AI) wave. That raises concerns that the Taiwan market is overly concentrated in the chip sector, but the chairman downplays such worries. "It's a common concern that our market trading is concentrated in a certain sector (such as chips), but that's not a rare phenomenon in international markets," the chairman said. He noted that Taiwan is not the only international market dominated by a single sector led by an industry behemoth like TSMC.

"For example, Samsung is in the same situation in South Korea," he said.

(Reporting by Faith Hung and Emily Chan; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Christian Schmollinger)