The fate of the bill to lower interest rates on revolving credit remained uncertain yesterday as ruling and opposition lawmakers disagreed on the issue and a foreign bank urged the legislature to respect the market mechanism.
Victor Kuan (管國霖), country business manager of consumer banking at Citibank Taiwan, said the proposed revision would create a credit crunch and dampen consumer spending once it clears the lawmaking body.
The measure, sponsored by Chinese Nationalist Party Legislator Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑), seeks to replace the 20 percent ceiling on interest rates for revolving credit with a floating formula, namely 9 percent above the central bank’s rate on loans without collateral. That would cap the rate at 12.5 percent for credit and cash card debts as the borrowing costs for unsecured loans currently stands at 3.5 percent.
The bill further proposes setting the maximum lending cost for loans between companies at 12 percent above the central bank’s rate.
Kuan said banks would have no choice but to deny loans to customers with high default risk.
“People who have no cash on hand will either turn to the black market or stop spending,” Kuan told a seminar. “The scenario is unfavorable to financial health or economic growth.”
Hsieh and other colleagues said the legal reform would ease financial burdens on economically disadvantaged borrowers now that the central bank has made seven rate cuts since last September.
Kuan said banks were receptive to a floating design, but believed the government should avoid setting the rates for lenders. He challenged the lawmakers to explain how they arrived at the formula when the Financial Supervisory Commission had yet to complete a study on revolving credit costs.
“It is better to postpone the legislative process until after the report is published,” Kuan said. “The desire to care for the disadvantaged may backfire and benefit underground lenders instead.”
Wu Ching-chih (吳清池), another KMT lawmaker, said he planned to call cross-party talks later this week to remove resistance to the bill, which passed its first reading last month.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained