Price increasing for singapore property !

Guest · on *09 Jul 08 7:07 pm*

Omen Predicts Stock-Market Crash

An ominous technical signal known as the Hindenburg Omen could be predicting the next stock market crash.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=789010961

Guest · on *09 Jul 08 7:17 pm*

Guest · on *09 Jul 08 7:22 pm*

Guest · on *09 Jul 08 7:46 pm*

As usual, watch what I said over 9-mths ago:

The previous major resistant was somewhere in 2600-2700 level which was the previous peak in (Yr1994)(Yr1996)(Yr2000)... This resistant has been rise gradually close to 2800. This resistant was broken in end 2006... And only then we saw a suddenly surge in property market in Feb/Mar 07 just after CNY. (just like a turbo spinning to gather its power.. without you knowing it till you have a sudden surge of power in the car once the turbo kicks in)

Since the major resistant was broken, its now become a major support of the whole upswing. So now the STI already entering into a new zone of 28XX to 39XX.
28XX became a major support now & 39XX became a major resistant now. Both will rise gradually & thats why some analysis predicted it will reach 4000 level when its going to try for the 2nd time.

So as long as STI remain above at this major support (2800 level)... thats isn't much adjustment to our property market! If later STI started to climb.. you still don't believe.. till above 3500.. 3600 level.. then is too late for you if you still hoping for any correction in property market, even for the next few years.. at least!! Wink

Guest · on *09 Jul 08 9:17 pm*

property is not always correlated to stock market lar

Guest · on *09 Jul 08 10:07 pm*

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 12:04 am*

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 6:56 am*

some condos around bukit timah already dropped by 30%

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 7:04 am*

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 10:03 am*

Singapore Economy Grows at Slowest Pace in Five Years

By Shamim Adam

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Singapore's economy expanded at the slowest pace in five years in the second quarter, as manufacturers cut production amid declining orders and accelerating inflation crimped spending.

Gross domestic product increased 1.9 percent from a year earlier, after expanding a revised 6.9 percent in the first three months of 2008, the trade ministry said in a statement today. That was lower than the 3.2 percent median estimate of 18 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

A slowdown in the U.S., Asia's largest export market, has hurt demand for Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. chips and Hyundai Motor Co. cars, damping growth in the region. Surging fuel and food costs, which have pushed Singapore's inflation to a 26-year high, have also left consumers with less to spend.

``The U.S. remains a very important source of demand for Asian economies,'' said Tai Hui, head of Southeast Asian economic research at Standard Chartered Plc in Singapore. ``The risk remains on the downside for the manufacturing sector given that demand remains fairly weak.''

Asian policy makers are predicting expansion this year will be at the lower end of their targets or are reducing growth forecasts as they increase estimates for inflation.

The Bank of Korea last week raised its 2008 inflation forecast to 4.8 percent from December's prediction of 3.3 percent. Economic growth will slow to 4.6 percent this year from 5 percent in 2007, it said.

Growth Forecasts

Malaysia's central bank Governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz last month said soaring food and energy prices may hurt household spending and damp economic growth, slowing expansion in 2008 to below its March forecast of as much as 6 percent. Bank Negara Malaysia plans to revise its estimates for Southeast Asia's third-largest economy later this month.

``Inflation expectations may take the wind out of the still-resilient Asian economies,'' said Song Seng-Wun, an economist at CIMB-GK Securities Pte. in Singapore. ``If more is spent on food, there will be less for other economic activities.''

Increased trade between Asian nations will shield the region from easing demand for goods from the U.S., and allow it to recover more quickly from a slowdown in the world's largest economy, Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said yesterday.

Asia's developing nations are almost twice as reliant on exports as the rest of the world, with 60 percent of their sales abroad ultimately destined for the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Drag on Growth

Singapore still expects growth this year to be between 4 percent and 6 percent, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said yesterday. It expanded 7.7 percent last year.

``Our export-oriented sectors, especially manufacturing, are being hit by deteriorating economic conditions in the U.S. and Europe,'' Shanmugaratnam said. ``This is likely to continue in the coming months and the weakness in manufacturing will act as a drag on overall GDP growth.''

Singapore's economy shrank an annualized 6.6 percent in the three months to June, contracting for the second time in three quarters. It grew a revised 15.6 percent in the first quarter.

The island's manufacturing industry contracted 5.6 percent last quarter from a year earlier, compared with a revised 12.7 percent gain in the first three months of the year.

Electronics Decline

Singapore's electronics exports have declined for 16 consecutive months, and pharmaceutical exports slumped in April and May. Electronics account for about 30 percent of Singapore's manufacturing and drugs make up around 22 percent.

The island's industrial output tends to fluctuate from month to month because of swings in production by drug companies which shut plants for cleaning before making different products.

Singapore's trade promotion body has lowered its forecast for export growth this year to between 2 percent and 4 percent, from an earlier range of 4 percent to 6 percent.

Services climbed 6.9 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, slowing from a 7.6 percent pace in the previous three months. The construction industry grew 15.2 percent, easing from a rate of 16.9 percent in the earlier quarter, according to today's report.

[b]The island's property market has slowed and the proportion of unsold new private homes rose in the second quarter, according to government data.

Singapore's private home prices rose 0.4 percent in the three months to June, the slowest pace in almost four years, the government said on July 1, signaling a real-estate boom that began in 2004 may be coming to an end. [b]

The growth figures today are computed from data for April and May. Revised numbers will be released next month.

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 2:36 pm*

Sui! It's all very D&G!

DOOM AND GLOOM for the Speculators! BURN! BURN! BURN!

DIE ! DIE ! DIE!

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 3:39 pm*

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 4:48 pm*

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 5:28 pm*

Anonymous wrote:
some condos around bukit timah already dropped by 30%

which ones? maybe can help us get a good discount bargain.

reply: Springdale

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 6:22 pm*

U.K. House Prices Fall Annual 6.1%, Most Since 1993

By Jennifer Ryan

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. house prices fell the most in 15 years in June as rising interest rates and reduced mortgage lending exacerbated the worst property slump since the last recession in 1991, an HBOS Plc report showed.

The average cost of a home declined 6.1 percent in the three months ending in June from a year earlier, the biggest drop since March 1993, the U.K.'s biggest mortgage lender said in a statement on the Regulatory News Service today. Prices fell 2 percent on the month to an average 180,344 pounds ($356,000).

Declining house prices are damaging consumer confidence and eroding support for Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Bank of England policy makers will probably refrain from cutting the key interest rate today after inflation reached the highest rate in more than a decade.

``The sharp downturn in the housing market will hit consumer spending and residential investment hard,'' said Nick Kounis, an economist at Fortis Bank and a former U.K. Treasury official. The U.K. economy may be ``flirting with recession in the second half of the year.''

Recent opinion polls have given the opposition Conservatives a lead of 20 points or more over the ruling Labour Party, enough to form a majority government. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they're not satisfied with Brown's performance since he succeeded Tony Blair 13 months ago, according to a poll by Populus Ltd. published July 7.

Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, standing in for Brown in Parliament yesterday, said ``the current state of the U.K. housing market is of grave cause for concern.''

Job Cuts

[bold]Barratt Developments Plc today became the fifth U.K. homebuilder this month to announce job cuts to cope with the property downturn. U.K. mortgage rates surged to the highest in eight years last month, the central bank reported yesterday.

The slump comes after house prices tripled in the previous decade, fueling a consumer spending boom and saddling Britons with a record 1.4 trillion pounds of debt.

``The decline in prices is driven by a squeeze on spending power, affordability difficulties due to the rapid rise in house prices in the last few years and the decline in credit availability resulting from the crisis in the financial markets,'' HBOS said in the statement.

Consumer confidence plunged to the lowest since 1990 last month after inflation accelerated to 3.3 percent in May, exceeding the government's upper 3 percent limit for only the second time in a decade. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. says the economy may start to contract this quarter. [/b]

Concerns about inflation will prompt the Bank of England to keep the key rate at 5 percent, the highest among the Group of Seven nations, according to 48 of 49 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. The decision is due to be announced at noon.

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 9:09 pm*

Guest · on *10 Jul 08 10:30 pm*

Guest · on *11 Jul 08 9:20 am*

nevertheless, it dropped by nearly 30%

Guest · on *11 Jul 08 1:38 pm*

The Fannie and Freddie doomsday scenario

It's time to wonder what would happen if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed.
By Katie Benner, writer-reporter
Last Updated: July 10, 2008: 10:22 PM EDT

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Here's a scary, and relevant, question to ponder as the housing market continues to slide: What would it take for the government to step in and help Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and how would a rescue affect you, the taxpayer?

It's been a brutal week for Freddie (FRE, Fortune 500) and Fannie (FNM, Fortune 500). A Lehman analyst report Monday kicked off a stock rout that had shares in both companies hitting fresh multi-year lows Thursday. Freddie was down 19% in afternoon trading; Fannie was down more than 10%.

The stock plunge, together with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's downbeat housing outlook on Tuesday, is forcing investors to consider what would happen if a bailout is needed - a prospect raised Thursday when William Poole, the former president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, told Bloomberg the companies are already "insolvent."

Also on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that officials at the U.S. Treasury Department have been monitoring the companies for months as part of its normal contingency planning, but that discussions about what to do should they collapse have picked up in recent weeks.

A grim outlook
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that help the mortgage market function by purchasing pools of loans and packaging them into securities. If one or both couldn't function, the result would be chaos.

At the end of last year, Fannie alone had packaged and guaranteed about $2.8 trillion worth of mortgages, approximately 23% of all outstanding U.S. mortgage debt. And these securities are highly rated and sold to investors all over the world.

"If Fannie or Freddie failed, it would be far worse than the fall of [investment bank] Bear Stearns," says Sean Egan, head of credit ratings firm Egan Jones. "It could throw the economy into depression or something close to it."

Clearly, investors are concerned. Credit default swaps - a kind of insurance against the possibility of Fannie and Freddie defaulting on their corporate bonds, are at their most expensive levels in 14 weeks; both companies are expected to report steep losses for the second quarter; and their main business, mortgage securitization, is under pressure as home price values decline and foreclosure numbers rise.

"The major issue is that these are very leveraged financial institutions, leveraged much more than any other bank, and they have lots of mortgage assets. As real estate values decline every day, the value of [the mortgages that it bundles, guarantees, and sells] are called into question," says Dalton Investments co-founder Steve Persky, who has been focused on distressed mortgage assets.

The possibility of government aid looms because it's hard to see how the private market can help the companies. Their stock market values have dropped so low that it would be difficult for them to raise money. For example, Egan estimates that Freddie alone will need to raise $7 billion over the next two quarters due to writedowns and losses. But the company's market capitalization - the number of outstanding shares times the share price stands at $8.7 billion.

"An investment banker would be hard pressed to raise an amount of money nearly equal to the value of the entire company," Egan says.

What's more, both companies have already raised a total of $13 billion by issuing preferred stock at the end of 2007; and they reduced their dividend payments to conserve cash.

The disaster scenarios
The Federal Reserve and the Treasury have taken great pains to point out that the government is not obligated to bail out either Fannie or Freddie if they face insolvency.

It's debatable where the legal obligations lie, but as a practical matter, the government can't let these institutions fail because they are being counted up on to help fix the mortgage mess. If Fannie and Freddie were unable to buy and back loans, banks would stop originating them and the pool of homebuyers would shrink, causing home prices to fall even further.

"If the government believes the companies serve an essential role in the market, which they do, they cannot let them fail," says Joseph Mason, an economics professor with the University of Louisiana who focuses on the mortgage markets.

So what would force the Treasury and Fed to step in?

Fannie and Freddie are among the most highly-leveraged companies around, meaning the amount of capital they have on hand is nowhere close to the level of assets they control.

Fannie and Freddie must constantly borrow money in order to operate; if for any reason borrowing costs rose sharply they would not be able to make good on their guarantees or even fund their day to day operations. This is when the government would feel intense pressure to step in and, at the very least, pay contracts in a timely manner.

In an April report, Standard & Poor's said an Armageddon scenario whereby Fannie and Freddie are insolvent is unlikely, but that the mere possibility of failure at either is a greater threat to the economy than the actual collapse of any investment bank.

The bailout scenarios
So what might it look like if the government had to lend a hand? Outright nationalization is an unlikely option given that neither the current administration nor the presidential candidates could afford to support such a move in an election year.

More likely, the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve would come in and provide a liquidity backstop, in the form of a loan or guarantee to bondholders that they will be paid. Fannie and Freddie could even do a preferred stock deal with the government, much like the deal forged by Citigroup with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, says Egan.

That would allow give officials the ability to argue that they weren't bailing out the companies, but rather making an investment that would pay off in the long run.

Mason has a diffferent twist on a possible intervention. If either were to face insolvency, he says the government should purchase a large voting block of equity in the institution and use that as a tool to eliminate any dividends, replace officers and manage the firms back to solvency.

"But [a rescue] would be a political situation, so it would be messy," says Mason. "Fannie and Freddie would fight against having officers replaced. They would want to keep the dividend."

The doomsday scenario could cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion, says the S&P report. The report went so far as to say that a government bailout of Fannie or Freddie could force the agency to lower its rating on the creditworthiness of the United States.

Price increasing for singapore property !

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Price increasing for singapore property !