Asian stocks look set to climb following gains in U.S. equities and bonds, as investors shrugged off a higher-than-forecast rise in U.S. inflation to focus on the path of the global recovery. Johnson & Johnson shares fell as a vaccine investigation kicked off into concerns about blood clotting, while rivals Moderna and Pfizer advanced. Treasuries extended gains on a successful sale of 30-year bonds and the U.S. dollar fell. Bitcoin jumped to an all-time high and the Nasdaq set a reference price of $250 for the direct listing of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

South Koreans must learn how to work alongside robots and AI if they want to thrive in a post-pandemic world, the country’s labor minister says. “Automation and AI will change South Korea faster than other countries,” Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Jae-kap said Tuesday, adding that “not all jobs may be replaced by machines.” Capitalizing on the expertise of global technology giants such as Samsung Electronics, Korea is accelerating efforts to become a resilient, tech-centric economy that can keep punching above its weight in global supply chains.

Grab Holdings Inc. said it would go public on the Nasdaq Stock Market by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, securing a near-$40 billion valuation in a new milestone for the SPAC boom that has swept U.S. financial markets.

The $39.6 billion deal to list Grab, a ride-hailing, food-delivery and digital-wallet group that operates across much of Southeast Asia, is by far the biggest involving a blank-check company and means Grab’s valuation has more than doubled in just 18 months. The merger also comes alongside a $4 billion-plus fundraising, which is the largest-ever share sale by a Southeast Asian company in the U.S.

Upon completion of its merger, the SoftBank-backed company will trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol GRAB.

Shares of the company trade in the private market at a valuation of more than US$250-billion, people familiar with the dealings have said. At that level, Zhang, who owns about a quarter of ByteDance, could be worth more than $60-billion, placing him alongside Tencent Holdings’ Pony Ma, bottled-water king Zhong Shanshan and members of the Walton and Koch families in the US, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

ByteDance, famous for its short-video apps and news aggregator Toutiao, more than doubled revenue last year after expanding beyond its core advertising business into areas such as e-commerce and online gaming. It’s now weighing options for the initial public offering of some businesses.

LONDON, April 13 (Reuters) - Investment bank JPMorgan recommended selling emerging market currencies on Tuesday, completing a 180 degree pivot from the start of the year when it was backing them to have a good run.

"We take another step down in our EM risk allocation, moving EM FX to UW (underweight)" the bank's analysts said in a research note.

They cited the likelihood of an extended period of EM growth underperformance versus developed markets like the United States, renewed "idiosyncratic risks in large EMs" as well as rising COVID cases and slower vaccination programmes in developing economies.