MAS now unlikely to ease policy

A sharp plunge in IP increases the risk of a technical recession and possible easing.

Here's more from Bank of America Merrill Lynch:

No longer confident that MAS will ease policy
We are re-assessing our Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) policy easing call after having digested the CPI August press release and data, which came in at a higher than expected +3.9% year-on-year (vs. +4% in July) and a strong +0.6% on a month-on-month basis.

Bottomline is that we are no longer confident that MAS will ease the current slightly steeper modest and gradual S$NEER appreciation stance at the mid-October meeting (a call we had for the last few months). FX Strategist Christy Tan has closed her short S$NEER call.

We will wait for the August Industrial Production (out Wed 26 Sep), before finalizing our call. A sharp plunge in IP increases the risk of a technical recession and possible easing. Recent employment readings however (+29.2K in 2Q, +27.2K in 1Q) do not point to a sharp slowdown, with surveys still pointing towards healthy positive net hiring in coming quarters.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia