A real-estate expert suggested yesterday that Taiwan should treat schemes that help the elderly live off the equity built up in their houses as commercial products rather than social welfare benefits to ensure the sustainability of the system.
At a seminar on the subject yesterday, Chang Chin-oh (張金鶚), a professor in the Department of Land Economics at National Chengchi University, advocated using reverse mortgages and sale/leasebacks to help senior citizens who have low incomes but a house of their own boost their disposable income.
At present, government initiatives to launch such financing plans are handled by the Ministry of the Interior, which treats them as pensions, with the government providing most of the financing.
Chang said that loans are by definition financial products and involve managing flows of money, meaning that the financial authorities should be in charge of them. He added that reverse mortgages should be commercialized rather than arranged by the government.
Reverse mortgages are simply loans made to a homeowner against the property’s equity. The money can be released in one lump sum or in multiple payments and is repaid when the property is sold or refinanced by the borrower’s heirs after he or she dies.
The sale/leaseback option would allow the elderly to sell their homes to insurance firms, which in turn offer the seniors annuities based on the value of their properties while still allowing them to reside in their own homes as tenants.
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