The government should offer more incentives to attract bank excess reserves worth more than NT$4 trillion (US$121.1 billion) to invest in capital markets, a Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) official told a seminar yesterday.
“Taiwan has the best high-tech industry investment analysts in Asia, allowing it to utilize strength in asset management, but complementary measures are needed in order to effectively attract capital,” FSC Commissioner Yeh Yin-hua (葉銀華) was quoted as saying by the Central News Agency.
Yeh was invited by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) to give a speech yesterday on Taiwan’s economic prospects.
Taiwan could offer incentives such as convenient capital transfer and tax preferences to attract domestic and foreign investment in local capital markets, especially banks holding more than NT$4 trillion in excess reserves, Yeh said. This type of idle capital could help revitalize the market, he said.
If the government encouraged local businesspeople to remit overseas capital to Taiwan by offering tax benefits, it would provide Taiwan’s market with growth momentum, while prompting local banks to hire more asset management personnel, he said.
Yeh said the FSC was working to enhance diversity in financial products to strengthen the protection of investor rights while helping businesses utilize their strengths in asset management to attract investment.
In attracting foreign capital, Yeh said the government could target the “Greater China area,” including China, Hong Kong, Singapore and even overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Yeh was confident that Taiwan’s market was capable of doing so.
In other news, the FSC’s latest data showed that the 1,270 companies listed on the TAIEX and the over-the-counter (OTC) market had recovered to see 101.1 percent and 80.85 percent growth respectively in quarter-on-quarter sales for the first quarter of the year.
TAIEX-listed and OTC-listed companies, however, saw a decline of 64.4 percent and 172.83 percent repectively in year-on-year sales for last year, the FSC statement said, without providing figures.
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NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
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