China should take steps to restrain bubble-like expansion in housing markets and tame excessive financial inflows into property, a People’s Bank of China (PBOC) economist said.
“Measures should be taken to put a brake on the excessive bubble expansion in the property sector and we should curb excessive financing into the real-estate sector,” Ma Jun (馬駿), chief economist of the central bank’s research bureau, said in an interview with China Business News.
One-third of the financial-system leverage added over the past decade has come from the surge of housing prices, Ma said.
Cities from Shanghai to Shenzhen have been rolling out tightening measures this year as local officials tackle overheating that followed monetary stimulus.
Central bank policymakers are grappling with how to support growth without spurring unsustainable price gains.
The bank’s easing cycle included a series of cuts that pushed interest rates to record lows, where they have been since October last year.
“The PBOC will be very cautious about the impact of further monetary policy easing,” said Raymond Yeung (楊宇霆), chief greater China economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd in Hong Kong.
The central bank “is wary of the overheating property market and fast-rising mortgage loans,” Yeung said.
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