Singapore records 13th straight monthly rise in bank lending

SINGAPORE, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- Singapore's total loans, including bills financing Domestic Banking Units (DBU), witnessed a predicted year-on-year growth of 6.84 percent in October, to 649.56 billion Singapore dollars.

It is a growth for the 13th successive month.

Compared with the 640.68 billion Singapore dollars in September, the figure rose 1.39 percent month-on-month, faster than a 0.99-percent growth in the previous month.

In October, DBU's loans to businesses grew 8.98 percent year-on-year and 1.94 percent month-on-month, to 390.71 billion Singapore dollars. In a breakdown, the loans to building and construction reached 120.41 billion dollars, rising 0.9 percent year-on-year and accounting for 30.82 percent of the total business loans.

DBU's consumer loans in October reached 258.86 billion Singapore dollars, up 3.76 percent year-on-year and 0.57 percent month-on-month.

Selena Ling, head of Treasury Research & Strategy of OCBC Bank, said though the bank loans growth in October was better than expected at an year-on-year 6.8 percent and brought the first 10 months performance to a robust year-on-year 6 percent, the bank still think there could be a modest pullback for the remaining two months of the year.

"Taking into account the October data, we have tweaked our full-year 2017 bank loans growth forecast to 5.7 percent year-on-year," she added. (1 Singapore dollar = 0.74 U.S. dollar) Enditem