Market Snapshot
Singapore stocks opened lower on Thursday. STI fell 0.9%, DBS fell 0.5%, OCBC and UOB fell 1%, SingTel fell 0.8%, Seatrium fell 2.3%, NIO rose 2.7%.
SG Local News
Singapore Set to Keep Monetary Policy Tight, May Ease in October
Singapore’s central bank will likely maintain tight monetary policy settings for a fourth straight time as inflation remains elevated though an easing is widely expected later this year.
All 20 economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which uses the exchange rate rather than interest rates to stabilize prices, will keep its overall policy settings on April 12. The decision is expected to come at the same time as the release of advance estimates for the city-state’s first-quarter gross domestic product.
The tone of MAS’s statement will likely stay relatively unchanged at the second of its four-times-a-year decision, according to 10 of 14 economists who responded to the question. Three predict that policymakers will relay a hawkish bias while Bank of America anticipates them to be less so.
The monetary authority tightened five times since October 2021 before opting to pause in 2023. Since its last decision in January, data showed core inflation quickened. That came days after remarks by MAS Deputy Managing Director Edward Robinson that the current policy setting keeps the currency band on an “appropriately restrictive posture to ensure that core inflation declines to 2% by early 2025.”
ADB Sees Singapore Growth Accelerating and Inflation Slowing in 2024 to 2025
Singapore’s economic growth will accelerate over the next two years, boosted by stronger exports, while inflation will slow, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on April 11.
The Manila-headquartered bank said Singapore will clock gross domestic product growth of 2.4 per cent in 2024, up from 1.1 per cent in 2023.
Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) has forecast that GDP in 2024 will expand between 1 per cent and 3 per cent. The International Monetary Fund projects Singapore’s growth at 2.1 per cent for 2024.
MTI will release the advance GDP estimates for the first quarter of 2024 on April 12. On the same day, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) will issue its quarterly statement on its Singapore-dollar policy stance.
Singaporean Writers Object to IMDA Using Their Works to Train a Large Language Model
The local writing community is objecting to the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) plans to build a South-east Asia-focused large language model (LLM).
The National Multimodal LLM Programme (NMLP), “a base model with regional context that can understand Singapore’s and the region’s unique linguistic characteristics and multilingual environment”, was announced in December 2023.
But Singapore writers whose works would have to be used to train the LLM recently voiced their displeasure about the project.
An LLM is artificial intelligence (AI) that can understand and generate text responses after being trained on a data set of written materials. The issue of writers’ works being illegally copied for data used to train LLMs such as Llama from Meta and OpenAI’s ChatGPT has triggered lawsuits in the United States.
In an Era of Great Power Politics, Countries Must Cooperate to Protect Multilateralism: DPM Wong
As the world returns to an era of great power politics, it is crucial for countries to work together for better global outcomes – including Singapore and Germany, which are aligned on many issues, said Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Lawrence Wong on Tuesday (Apr 9).
“We share common strategic perspectives around upholding the rule of law, multilateralism, open trading systems, (and) pushing back against protectionism and economic fragmentation, just to cite a few examples,” he said.
Wong was speaking at a reception for Singaporeans living in Germany, held at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin. The event capped the Berlin leg of his ongoing six-day trip to Germany and France – his first official visit to Europe as DPM.
Singapore Financial Institutions Consistent With Global Trends for Gender Balance: Report
Of the institutions tracked in this year’s global Gender Balance Index (GBI), 63 appointed either a new governor or a new chief executive – but only nine of these new appointees, or 14 per cent, were women.
The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), an independent think tank that produced the report, said: “2023 was an opportunity to move the dial on female leadership; however, it was missed in many instances.”
The index tracks the presence of men and women in senior positions across 335 institutions: 185 central banks, 50 leading commercial banks, 50 public pension funds and 50 sovereign funds.
These include six Singaporean institutions: the Central Provident Fund (CPF) Board under pension funds; OCBC and DBS under commercial banks; the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) under central banks; and GIC and Temasek under sovereign funds.
Overall, Singapore’s institutions are in line with global gender balance trends, with the country’s scores improving over the past three years, said OMFIF senior research analyst Arunima Sharan.