Singapore is enjoying a golden period, says Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. It’s true the economy is flourishing. My attention was naturally drawn to the Sunday Times headline which quoted his words. After all, how many leaders can make such claims?
But it’s significant what he had to say about property prices. Check spike in property prices or lose competitiveness, he warned. And that appropriately was the headline used by Channel NewsAsia.
The property market, especially at the higher end, is booming, pushing up prices even in some of the public housing estates. Plenty of homeowners and developers have been making a killing and the Straits Times — the Sunday Times’ sister newspaper — has been breathlessly reporting the story.
But Mr Lee had his reasons for urging caution. He must have been thinking of the previous property boom, in the 1990s. Singaporeans had become millionaires, he said at the height of the property boom. I still remember the Straits Times front page headline. But then the bubble burst. The Asian financial crisis hit the economy hard. Property prices collapsed.
Even now, many housing estate apartments are still worth less than they were before the bubble burst.
Meanwhile, rising costs are not deterring multinationals from coming to Singapore, reports the Straits Times today, quoting Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong.
But expatriates have been murmuring about rising rentals, as has been reported even in the Straits Times.
And Singapore was not featured in this year’s list of the World’s 50 Most Livable Cities by the Economist magazine. I was surprised because Singapore did very well in the magazine’s previous surveys.
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