Credit control measures have achieved the goal of maintaining the nation’s financial stability, but are unlikely to make houses more affordable, central bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) said yesterday.
Yang made the comments while fielding questions on the central bank’s operations at a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee.
“The series of credit controls were intended to prevent money from overflowing into the real-estate market and straining the financial system in times of credit tightening,” the governor said, adding that the US Federal Reserve has indicated plans to taper its bond-buying program later this year and to hike interest rates following better employment figures.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Barring lenders from granting grace periods on second-home purchases in the six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu City and Hsinchu County, was intended to prevent overleveraging on the part of individual buyers, Yang said.
Wealth management analysts have encouraged people to acquire real estate and take advantage of record-low interest rates, which average 1.31 percent for house loans.
“Micro adjustments” are necessary after two previous waves of credit controls failed to cool real-estate lending, Yang said.
The governor said that he partially agreed with the opinion of Highwealth Construction Corp (興富發) founder Cheng Chin-tien (鄭欽天) that credit controls reflect a boom in the property market.
However, developers would like to portray the market in a way that helps boost property sales and prices, Yang said.
Asked whether tightening measures would help make houses affordable again for ordinary people, the governor said that the goal has proved “unachievable” over the years and the central bank has instead sought to “induce a soft landing.”
Toward that end, the central bank is closely monitoring the market and would introduce adjustments if necessary, he added.
A central bank report shows that in the first half of the year, the bank intervened in the foreign-exchange market by buying US$8.73 billion of US dollars to slow the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar.
Exporters have said that profit erosion caused by a strong NT dollar, which has outperformed other Asian currencies this year.
The NT dollar has hovered between NT$27.5 and NT$28 against the US dollar in the past three months, the central bank said, adding that the NT dollar’s direction hinges on global demand for the US dollar and Taiwanese exports.
Strong exports would lend support to the local currency, while bond-buying tapering and interest rate hikes by the US Fed would bolster the US dollar, Yang said.
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
RSS