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.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
RSS