If the legislature insists on making a drastic cut to the top interest rate for revolving credit, it should also propose supporting measures to meet the needs of disadvantaged borrowers who may be forced to borrow from non-bank lenders with an average 32.5 percent interest rate, pundits said yesterday.
“The legislature should be simultaneously mulling bills to regulate pawn shops, private non-bank money lenders and debt collectors, otherwise it will put these marginal borrowers in an even more vulnerable position,” George Lin (林繼恆), a lawyer with Lin & Partners (恆業法律) and the Bankers Association of ROC (銀行公會), told a public hearing in the legislature yesterday.
Pawn shops currently charge interest rates of more than 40 percent, he said.
The legislature earlier this month passed the first reading of a bill that would cap the interest rate of revolving credit at 12.5 percent, down from the current 20 percent.
Underground lenders would reap the biggest benefit from a new rate cap if the bill completes its second and third readings in the next weeks.
Lin Chien-fu (林建甫), chairman of the Taiwan Competitiveness Forum, said the legislature’s move would reverse the nation’s efforts in financial liberalization and impede market forces.
But in the event that the legislature passes the bill, Lin Chien-fu urged the government to empower a state-run bank to accept loan requests from marginal borrowers who would likely be rejected by other banks. Government revenue should be used to write off potential bad loans, he added.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day