SG Morning Highlights | Singapore's latest six-month Treasury bill offers decades-high yield of 4.4%

Advancers / Decliners is 90 to 23, with 50.16 million securities worth S$48.25 million changing hands.

The bank expects the global economy to grow at 1.7 per cent in 2023, weaker than a 2.4 per cent rise estimated for the current year, it said in a client note on Thursday (Dec 8).

Wells Fargo sees the US economy slipping into a "modest" recession beginning in mid-2023 and expects it to end the year with annual growth of 0.2 per cent, much slower than a 2 per cent rise estimated for 2022.

Recurring applications for US unemployment benefits rose to the highest since early February, suggesting that Americans who are losing their jobs are having more trouble finding a new one as the labour market shows tentative signs of cooling.

Continuing claims – which include people who have already received unemployment benefits for a week or more – climbed by 62,000 to 1.7 million in the week ended Nov 26, Labor Department data showed on Thursday (Dec 8).

Initial unemployment claims increased by 4,000 to 230,000 in the week ended Dec 3. The figure was in line with the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The cut-off yield on Singapore's latest six-month Treasury bill (T-bill) that closed on Thursday (Dec 8) shot up to 4.4 per cent, the second highest since the return last peaked at 4.73 per cent in 1988.

The risk-free, fixed-income product by the Singapore government was about two times subscribed for the S$4.6 billion allotment in the latest auction, with the non-competitive bids totalling S$1.2 billion being fully allotted.

This translates to 562.8 million votes, Keppel said in a bourse filing after an extraordinary general meeting on Thursday (Dec 8) held to put the proposal to a vote.

Against votes amounted to 214,126, or 0.04 per cent of the votes cast.

This translates into an issuance of 29.8 million new ordinary shares to Oei at S$0.18 apiece, a 50 per cent premium to A-Smart's closing price of S$0.12 on 6 Dec, 2022.

The placement makes Oei a substantial shareholder, and also the second-largest shareholder after Chinese entrepreneur Ma Wai Dong, who acquired a 52 per cent stake in 2016.