Eurozone banks are toughening their requirements of prospective mortgage borrowers, a European Central Bank (ECB) survey published yesterday showed, although demand for home purchase loans continued to swell.
Credit standards — the boxes house-hunters have to check to receive a mortgage — tightened by 3 percent between January and last month, lenders said.
Meanwhile, “net demand for housing loans continued to increase in the first quarter, driven mainly by the low general level of interest rates,” the ECB said.
Although demand for other forms of consumer borrowing also grew, companies’ appetite for credit was only “stable” compared with the previous quarter, marking time after continuous increases since early 2015.
January’s round of the quarterly poll of almost 150 banks had forecast a slowdown in demand for loans, as weaker economic indicators pointed to slowing growth in the eurozone.
“Hard” data and “soft” pointers from surveys have both confirmed that the weaker expansion seen late last year has persisted into this year.
The ECB last month lowered its annual growth forecast for this year by 0.6 points to 1.1 percent — following in the footsteps of organizations such as the IMF.
It blamed a familiar litany of culprits, including uncertainty over Brexit and trade disputes between the US, China and the EU.
Frankfurt policymakers predict a resurgence in the second half, ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos told European Parliament lawmakers last week.
Meanwhile, Portuguese Minister of Finance Mario Centeno — who leads regular Eurogroup meetings of treasury bosses from the single currency area — last week said that a Brexit deal and trade truces between Washington, Beijing and Brussels could help lift the clouds.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained