The US Federal Reserve’s third round of quantitative easing (QE3) will affect Taiwan’s stock market for one to two months, UBS Securities Taiwan said on Saturday.
The quantitative easing policy will likely benefit the stocks of companies in the construction sector and those with high tangible assets more than any others, said William Dong (董成康), head of research at UBS Securities Taiwan.
The Fed announced on Thursday it would be spending US$40 billion to buy mortgage-backed securities every month for however long it deems necessary, a move Dong said would promote the flow of capital in the short term, which will indeed help Taiwanese stocks.
However, in the middle and long term the impact of QE3 will be decided by the strength of economic recovery, said Dong, who did not anticipate big changes in Taiwan’s economy over the next six months.
The TAIEX closed up 2.1 percent at 7,738.05 on Friday last week, its highest close since April. The index is expected to challenge the 8,000-point mark in the near term, but other academics and economists were cautious about the impact of QE3 on Taiwan.
Polaris Research Institute (寶華綜合經濟研究院) president Liang Kuo-yuan (梁國源) said he worried capital would flow to high-risk assets, including crude oil and commodities, while Liu Meng-chun (劉孟俊), director of the center for economic forecasting at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (中華經濟研究院), warned that Taiwan could soon face imported inflation.
Dong said he expected QE3 would lead to the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar, but by a lesser degree than during the previous two rounds of quantitative easing.
From November 2008 to March 2010, the NT dollar gained 4.8 percent during QE1 and about 6 percent during QE2 from November 2010 to June last year. The NT dollar rose NT$0.23 to close at NT$29.469 against the US dollar on Friday, its highest level since May 11.
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
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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