Local banks had approved 5,056 loan applications totaling NT$81.6 billion (US$2.72 billion) for businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as of Wednesday last week, surging from 510 applications totaling NT$7.39 billion two weeks earlier, Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) data showed yesterday.
Eighty-seven percent of the loans, or 4,177 applications for NT$71.7 billion, were provided by state-run banks, for an average of NT$17 million per application, the data showed.
Private banks lent NT$9.9 billion to 879 firms, for an average of NT$11 million per application, data showed.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
“It seems that the government did not have a strong incentive to encourage private banks to help affected businesses,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator William Tseng (曾銘宗) told a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee in Taipei.
The approved loans represented a tiny fraction of the nation’s total lending of NT$6.9 trillion to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Tseng said.
The lending does not appear significant, as the government’s relief program aims to support SMEs, commission Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said.
The commission would review its incentives for private banks to approve more loans for businesses affected by the pandemic, Koo said, adding that the government would cover most risks.
The Small and Medium Enterprise Credit Guarantee Fund of Taiwan offers credit guarantees of 80 to 90 percent, or even full guarantees, for small-scale firms, he said.
Separately, the FSC would not lift a ban on short selling on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange, even though the local equity market has recovered, Koo said.
The commission first needs to evaluate whether the pandemic has been brought under control in Europe and the US, as the local market is highly sensitive to foreign equity markets, he said.
The regulator announced the ban in the middle of last month to curb speculative trading amid “irrational declines” on the stock market.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
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Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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