Hua Nan Commercial Bank (
Hua Nan President Hsu Teh-nan (許德南) said the asset management company will analyze the bad loans and determine how they will be disposed of from the bank's balance sheet. Taiwan banks are grappling with rising loan defaults as the island enters its worst recession on record, with analysts saying the economy probably shrank 4.4 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier.
"One of the options is to liquidate assets," said Lehman Brothers Japan Inc Managing Director Jonathan Epstein after the agreement was signed. "Others can be restructured and sold back in to the banking system and some could be securitized." Lehman is keen to do business with other Taiwan lenders and expects to make ``many additional investments'' in Taiwan, Epstein said.
The US-based investment bank was among foreign lenders who bought up US$15 billion of bad loans from the Thai government in August. Lehman, Salomon Smith Barney Inc and Lend Lease Corp paid as much as US$233 million in May for bad loans from Korea's Hana Bank.
Lehman also tried to buy bad loans from Metropolitan Bank & Trust Co, the largest Philippine lender and Equitable Banking Corp, the country's third-largest bank.
Taiwan, which defines non-performing loans as those on which there have been no interest payments for three months or principal payments for six months, said more than 11 percent of bank lending was non-performing or in trouble at the end of September, though private sector estimates are higher.
"We have a lot more work to do in coming weeks with Hua Nan," Epstein said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
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