Housing and construction loans rose to their highest levels at the end of last month at NT$8.1 trillion (US$283.2 billion) and NT$2.83 trillion respectively, but their rate of increase slowed after the central bank tightened credit controls, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) said on Thursday.
Housing loans rose 0.3 percent, or NT$25.3 billion, from NT$8.08 trillion at the end of January, easing from a monthly growth of 0.7 percent in January and marking the smallest increase since August last year, commission data showed.
Construction loans, an indicator of real-estate developers’ confidence in the sector, also grew at a slower pace last month with monthly rise of NT$18.1 billion, or 0.6 percent, compared with a monthly growth of NT$40.7 billion in January, the data showed.
Continuing rises in mortgage and constructions loans have prompted some people question whether the central bank’s selective credit controls have effectively curbed the overheating property market since they took effect on Dec. 8 last year.
“Mortgage and construction loans rising at a slower rate suggests that the tightened credit controls have affected lending momentum,” FSC Banking Bureau Deputy Director-General Lin Chih-chi (林志吉) told a news conference in New Taipei City.
“However, it will take time before we see a drop in mortgage and construction loans, as some banks have contracts with real-estate developers with set lending goals. If the banks stick to the contracts, they will not refrain from offering new loans in the short term,” Lin said.
The central bank further tightened its credit controls on Friday last week, which might curb growth in mortgage and construction loans, the commission said.
The credit controls do not affect first-time home buyers, but they affect corporate and individual property investors, and highly leveraged borrowers by lowering the loan-to-value limit to 40 percent for all corporate buyers and 55 percent for multiple-home owners.
Some lenders, such as CTBC Bank (中信銀行), have told investors that the tightened credit measures would have a limited impact on its mortgage business, as the majority of their customers own one home.
Nonperforming housing loans totaled NT$9.8 billion at the end of last month, up from NT$9.7 billion a month earlier, while the nonperforming loan ratio remained flat at 0.12 percent, FSC data showed.
Nonperforming construction loans rose from NT$4.1 billion a month earlier to NT$4.2 billion at the end of last month, while the nonperforming loan ratio was flat at 0.15 percent, the data showed.
South Korea’s equity benchmark yesterday crossed a new milestone just a month after surpassing the once-unthinkable 5,000 mark as surging global memory demand powers the country’s biggest chipmakers. The KOSPI advanced as much as 2.6 percent to a record 6,123, with Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc each gaining more than 2 percent. With the benchmark now up 45 percent this year, South Korea’s stock market capitalization has also moved past France’s, following last month’s overtaking of Germany’s. Long overlooked by foreign funds, despite being undervalued, South Korean stocks have now emerged as clear winners in the global market. The so-called “artificial intelligence
CONFUSION: Taiwan, Japan and other big exporters are cautiously monitoring the situation, while analysts said more Trump responses ate likely after his loss in court US trading partners in Asia started weighing fresh uncertainties yesterday after President Donald Trump vowed to impose a new tariff on imports, hours after the Supreme Court struck down many of the sweeping levies he used to launch a global trade war. The court’s ruling invalidated a number of tariffs that the Trump administration had imposed on Asian export powerhouses from China and South Korea to Japan and Taiwan, the world’s largest chip maker and a key player in tech supply chains. Within hours, Trump said he would impose a new 10 percent duty on US imports from all countries starting on
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek’s (深度求索) latest AI model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia Corp’s most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, a senior official of US President Donald Trump’s administration said on Monday, in what could represent a violation of US export controls. The US believes DeepSeek will remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips, the official said, adding that the Blackwells are likely clustered at its data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. The person declined to say how the US government received
Like many of us who are mindful of our plastic consumption, Beth Gardiner would take her own bags to the supermarket and be annoyed whenever she forgot to do so. Out without her refillable bottle, she would avoid buying bottled water. “Here I am, in my own little life, worrying about that and trying to use less plastic,” she says. Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had plowed more than US$180 billion into plastic plants in the US since 2010. “It was a kick in the teeth,” Gardiner
RSS