China’s runaway property market cooled slightly last month, as authorities rolled out further home-buying curbs to deflate a housing bubble.
New-home prices, excluding Chinese government-subsidized housing, gained last month in 62 of the 70 cities tracked by the government, compared with 63 in September, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday.
Prices dropped in seven cities, compared with six a month earlier. They were unchanged in one.
PROPERTY CURBS
Some local authorities have stepped up property curbs, following a raft of restrictions rolled out in almost two dozen cities since late September.
Eastern Hangzhou ruled more non-local buyers ineligible last week, two months after halting purchases for some non-local residents.
China’s banking regulator has told banks to review their mortgage lending and property development loans after China Minsheng Banking Corp (中國民生銀行) suspended approvals of some non-standard mortgages in Shanghai.
Home prices in first-tier and red-hot second-tier cities “apparently” stabilized in the second half of last month after those regions announced fine-tuned curbs, the statistics bureau said.
Five cities, from Beijing to Xiamen, snapped a streak of price gains, the bureau said.
New-home prices in Shenzhen, the nation’s hottest property market earlier this year, fell 0.5 percent from September, the first decline in two years, the data showed.
Prices in Beijing fell 0.4 percent in the second half of last month, and declined 0.1 percent in Shanghai.
HOUSING BUBBLE
“Buyers and developers are now taking to the sidelines, creating a standoff in the market,” said Xia Dan (夏丹), a Shanghai-based analyst at Bank of Communications Co (交通銀行).
A cooling of the property market might provide some relief to policymakers, who are seeking to avoid a housing bubble without denting economic growth. Even amid curbs in major cities, property development investment rose 13 percent from a year earlier last month, the most since at least last year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on official data released on Monday last week.
New housing starts, an early indicator of real-estate investment, gained 20 percent from a year earlier, the biggest increase since April.
The Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has stepped up oversight of rogue players since early last month, investigating developers and agents for alleged false advertising, urging probes on “illegal” sales and cracking down on investment by online finance and peer-to-peer lenders.
France cannot afford to ignore the third credit-rating reduction in less than a year, French Minister of Finance Roland Lescure said. “Three agencies have downgraded us and we can’t ignore this cloud,” he told Franceinfo on Saturday, speaking just hours after S&P lowered his country’s credit rating to “A+” from “AA-” in an unscheduled move. “Fundamentally, it’s an additional cloud to a weather forecast that was already pretty gray. It’s a call for lucidity and responsibility,” he said, adding that this is “a call to be serious.” The credit assessor’s move means France has lost its double-A rating at two of the
AI BOOST: Although Taiwan’s reliance on Chinese rare earth elements is limited, it could face indirect impacts from supply issues and price volatility, an economist said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s economic growth this year to 5.6 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports and investment linked to artificial intelligence (AI), as it said that the current momentum could peak soon. The acceleration of the global AI race has fueled a surge in Taiwan’s AI-related capital spending and exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products, which have been key drivers of growth this year. “We have revised our GDP forecast for Taiwan upward to 5.6 percent from 4 percent, an upgrade that mainly reflects stronger-than-expected AI-related exports and investment in the third
Mercuries Life Insurance Co (三商美邦人壽) shares surged to a seven-month high this week after local media reported that E.Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) had outbid CTBC Financial Holding Co (中信金控) in the financially strained insurer’s ongoing sale process. Shares of the mid-sized life insurer climbed 5.8 percent this week to NT$6.72, extending a nearly 18 percent rally over the past month, as investors bet on the likelihood of an impending takeover. The final round of bidding closed on Thursday, marking a critical step in the 32-year-old insurer’s search for a buyer after years of struggling to meet capital adequacy requirements. Local media reports
RARE EARTHS: The call between the US Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart came as Washington sought to rally G7 partners in response to China’s export controls China and the US on Saturday agreed to conduct another round of trade negotiations in the coming week, as the world’s two biggest economies seek to avoid another damaging tit-for-tat tariff battle. Beijing last week announced sweeping controls on the critical rare earths industry, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten 100 percent tariffs on imports from China in retaliation. Trump had also threatened to cancel his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea later this month on the sidelines of the APEC summit. In the latest indication of efforts to resolve their dispute, Chinese state media reported that
RSS