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TOKYO • Singapore is offering a rare opportunity to buy positive-yielding quality bonds in a world that is rapidly turning negative. The city state, which pays the highest returns among economies that have AAA credit ratings from all three major agencies, will sell reopened July 2029 government debt worth US$2.9 billion (S$4 billion) on Wednesday, the second-largest amount on record for 10-year tenors. Investors fleeing risk on escalating trade wars and fears of a global recession have jumped into the safety of bonds, driving up their prices and pushing down their yields, given that bonds have fixed coupon rates or interest payments. Yields are also cascading lower as global central banks rush to cut interest rates, a factor feeding the downward spiral in yields. The result is that in the last few months, the global mountain of negative-yielding sovereign bonds has swelled to almost US$17 trillion – or 30 per cent of the global, tradeable bond universe. Investors now ho...

SINGAPORE: Despite trade tensions and other global uncertainties slowing down the economy to levels last seen a decade ago, investments into the country seem to have held steady so far.Singapore attracted almost S$8.1 billion in fixed asset investment (FAI) commitments during the first six months of 2019, according to figures from the Economic Development Board (EDB) released as part of the second-quarter economic report last week. In fact, the overall investment figure already falls within the EDB’s full-year forecast of S$8 billion to S$10 billion. By comparison, the country saw FAI commitments of S$5.3 billion during the same period last year. SECTOR, GEOGRAPHICAL BREAKDOWNS For the first six months of 2019, manufacturing has been the top source of investment commitments, raking in S$4.6 billion. Within manufacturing, the electronics cluster accounted for nearly two-thirds of the FAI secured. The remaining clusters – chemicals, precision engineering, g...

In today’s modern world, data has become the new gold. Yet, too much data can cause problems of its own, making it increasingly difficult for businesses big and small to understand how to extract insightful and important information from the large stockpiles of data they’ve obtained. Even more worrying is how this mass of data, when used incorrectly, affects entrepreneurs who are looking to obtain a commercial loan for their business. To better serve business owners and the 28.8 million small businesses that currently operate in the U.S., according to the U.S. Small Business Association, this excess of data needs to be filtered to improve the loan process. In the past, storing large volumes of data was simply cost-prohibitive and impractical. The introduction of distributed cloud-based storage has meant that businesses from every sector are storing all kinds of data (consumer and commercial) — including when consumers make a transaction, enter a store or even brow...

Banks have disbursed retail loans at the slowest rate in five years in the first half of 2019, latest data from RBI showed, amidst growing concerns of sluggish consumption demand and rising unemployment pegging down the country’s economic growth. As per RBI’s monthly sectoral deployment of credit data analysed by ET, the retail personal credit disbursement growth in the first half of 2019 between January and June was 7.3%. The credit growth in the first half 2018 was 7.7% while for the same period in 2017 it was 8.6%. The loan growth in the first halves of 2016 and 2015 was at 8.1% and 8.5%, respectively. The last time a slower retail credit disbursement by banks in the first half of a year was seen between January and June 2014 when a credit growth of 6.4% was registered; the same period when BJP-led NDA formed its first government with a record mandate. The slowing growth in retail loans comes despite 75 bps of repo rate cut in three consecutive monetary policies by the Res...