Singapore’s banks and REITs

Hi Lionel,

It is broad base question with multiple answers. I'd will give a brief one here.

Singapore will definitely feel the impact if US ever goes into recession. That will have spill over effects, depending on the severity of the crisis. We can see what happened to rental index of office and industrial asset class in 08/09 which took a sharp plunge but certain subsector of REIT will be more resilient than others. Likewise, bank may have record higher NPL as companies got into liquidity issues. Again, no one knows when the crisis will happened, so we focus a lot on long-term investing in high quality stocks/banks/reits and buy them whenever there is a severe crisis. These companies will come out stronger once the storm is over. If it is just simple no growth (no crisis) and high inflation, then stock and real estate investment will be one best asset classes to hedge against the inflation.