Singapore’s central bank yesterday signaled that it would maintain measures to cool residential property prices for now in the absence of any signs of a market slump.
“We’ve not seen any impending risk of a sharp sell-off,” Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Managing Director Ravi Menon said. “At this point I don’t see why there is a need to shift gears significantly in any way.”
The MAS is watching the market “very closely” following steps introduced last year to slow price increases, Menon said at a briefing on its annual report.
Photo: Reuters
Home values have fallen in the wake of the measures, which included raising stamp duties for second homes and tightening loan-to-value limits for mortgages.
“We have learned from experience that preventing a bubble from forming is less painful than deflating one that has fully formed,” Menon said.
Dwelling values fell for a second straight quarter in the three months that ended on March 31, with luxury home prices down 2.9 percent, the most since the quarter that ended in June 2009.
Earlier this month, the government cut the supply of private residential units under its land sales program in a bid to curb a glut in unsold apartments.
Singaporean Minister of National Development Lawrence Wong (黃循財) said last month that Singapore has succeeded in avoiding a “destabilizing correction” in the residential property market.
“Genuine homeowners” understand the need for measures that curtail speculation, he said in an interview.
Menon also said that he expects growth of Singapore’s financial sector to slow from last year, although it would continue to outpace the economy’s expansion.
A net 6,900 jobs were created last year in the financial services and fintech sectors, exceeding a target of adding 4,000 jobs annually, the MAS said.
Separately, the MAS has held discussions with Facebook Inc about its plans for a new cryptocurrency, although the regulator still sees significant obstacles in the way of the social media firm’s project.
Despite the potential benefits of Libra, concerns raised about the way it would function are “not trivial,” Menon said.
“The key challenge is to figure out the nature of the beast,” Menon said. “What is it more like and which box we can put it into. At this point we are not sure yet.”
However, Menon also noted the potential benefits of Libra, which could provide a cheap payments system and help bring the unbanked into the mainstream financial system.
The current cross-border payments system is “expensive, inefficient, sometimes risky,” Menon said. “Libra offers a very interesting proposition that could help to address” those issues.
However, more information is needed to establish the potential advantages, Menon said, adding that there are many other experiments under way to address shortcomings in cross-border payments.
“At this point it’s not clear whether it offers a distinctly superior proposition to existing electronic payment mechanisms,” he said. “We need to understand how exactly it’s going to work,” including the economics of the project, as well as security and privacy issues.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts