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Asia Embraces Bullet Trains as Singapore-Malaysia Deal Looms

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Asia is embracing bullet trains like never before.

Singapore and Malaysia signed an agreement Tuesday that will bring a high-speed rail link to Kuala Lumpur by 2026. The long-envisioned plan, six years behind an earlier target completion date, follows a $5.5 billion project already underway in Indonesia. India last year chose Japan to build a $15 billion network, its first.

Asian nations are modernizing their transport infrastructure while China has set up the worlds biggest high-speed rail network. Japan has been running bullet trains for more than five decades now. As countries embrace the latest technology, its also pitting Chinese and Japanese manufacturers of super-fast trains against rivals such as Siemens AG and Bombardier Inc.

“Its a good sign because generally investors are looking to see more inter-connectivity across Southeast Asia," said Alan Richardson, a Hong Kong-based fund manager at Samsung Asset Management. That "will help to provide greater resilience to, or less reliance on other developed economies and also, should provide a more stable geopolitical environment with increasing inter-connectivity,” he said.

Final Negotiations

The memorandum of understanding on the rail line was signed in the presence of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his counterpart Najib Razak in the Malaysian administrative capital of Putrajaya. The agreement will pave the way for final negotiations on the development and execution of the 300-kilometer (185 miles) line connecting Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. A tender for the project will be issued next year, Najib told reporters on Tuesday.

Last year, Singapore and Malaysia said they would reassess the 2020 target for the completion of the project because of the scale and complexity of the venture. Leaders of the two countries had announced in 2013 the rail link may be completed by the end of this decade, with Najib calling it a “huge game changer” that will transform the way the neighbors do business.

"The high-speed rail is a key bilateral project for both countries," Lees office said in a statement Monday. "The two governments commitment to this project is a reflection of our strong bilateral ties and our continued efforts to deepen relations. When completed, the HSR will boost connectivity, strengthen economic ties and forge closer people-to-people linkages."

A joint project team will call for an international tender next month for a development partner to provide technical support to both the countries, according to a statement Tuesday from Malaysias Land Public Transport Commission and Singapores Land Transport Authority. It is too early to discuss the cost of the project, Najib said.

Shorter Journey

The high-speed rail line will trim the land journey between the two Southeast Asian cities to 90 minutes, from about five hours now. It will also challenge budget carriers such as AirAsia Bhd. and Singapore Airlines Ltd.s Tiger Airways, which fly passengers from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur in about an hour. Trains will run at a top speed of more than 300 kilometers an hour, the two governments said Tuesday.

"The Singapore-Malaysia sector has among the largest airline capacity within the region," said John Mathai, Bloomberg Intelligences Singapore-based transport analyst . "A high-speed rail could service some of the traffic within that segment, reducing congestion at airports."

Asias appetite for high-speed rail has also pitted Chinese rail giants such as CRRC Corp., and Japanese manufacturers Hitachi Ltd. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.against European rivals.

Exporting Technology

Japan, which built the worlds first high-speed train more than half a century ago, is stepping up efforts to export its bullet-train technology to meet a pledge by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to triple infrastructure exports to 30 trillion yen ($284 billion) by 2020. China, home to the worlds biggest high-speed rail network, has identified the sector as one of 10 focus industries in a blueprint for economic development.

Japan aims to sell bullet trains to the project and the government supports bids by its companies, Transport Minister Keiichi Ishii said in December. The country beat China to secure a $15 billion rail project in India.

Chinas Push

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is leading his nations overseas push by train equipment makers as part of the governments broader strategy to turn the country into an advanced industrial nation. He has targeted emerging markets in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia for rail-related orders, while also bidding for high-profile contracts in the developed world.

In October, a subsidiary of China Railway Group Ltd. partnered with local companies to win the rights to build a $5.5-billion high-speed railway line in Indonesia, the countrys first.

Malaysia and Singapore received close to 250 submissions after calling for a Request for Information for the project, and 98 were shortlisted, the New Straits Times reported in December.

Fourteen foreign entities among the 98 were asked to present their views, including Frances Alstom, Germanys Siemens AG, Spains CAF and Talgo SA, Canadas Bombardier, a group led by China Railway, as well as consortium from Japan and South Korea, the paper reported, without saying where it obtained the names.

 

Its Not a Housing Bubble, Its Just Expensive

Despite record home prices in some big cities, the U.S. market is nowhere near as bad as it was a decade ago.

Home prices have hit record highs in some major U.S. metropolitan areas, and house-flippers are behaving like its 2005: Its no wonder people are chattering about another housing bubble.

But residential real estate isnt in a speculative bubble, industry observers contend. Instead, a low inventory of available homes is driving prices higher—prices, however, will eventually recede as buyers throw up their hands, or as more new homes come on line. The structural issues that led to the housing collapse last decade arent present.

“The havoc during the last cycle was the result of building too many homes and of speculation fueled by loose credit,” said Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at Realtor.com. “Thats the exact opposite of what we have today.”    

To illustrate his point, Smoke compiled an index based on six factors he deemed crucial to the housing boom and bust of the mid-2000s, including price appreciation, the prevalence of house-flipping, and share of buyers who used mortgage financing. (The other factors are price-to-income, price-to-rent, and housing starts-to-household formation.) Then he benchmarked the index to 2001, a year when the housing market was fairly valued.

Last year, only six metro areas exceeded the benchmark by 10 percent, with San Jose coming in highest, at 19 percent above 2001 levels. In 2005, there were 29 cities that were at least that bubbly, as the chart below shows:

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The local markets that look the most like a bubble are, unsurprisingly, places where population is growing faster than housing supply. That includes California cities where zoning regulations have slowed or prevented new construction, as well as Texas markets in which rising land and labor costs, and some lingering aftershocks from the bust, have held back housing starts. Meanwhile, the share of U.S. households that rent is near 50-year highs, helping to drive up rental prices and giving investors across the country incentive to snatch up for-sale homes.  

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Prices in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area, among other places, are probably unsustainable, Smoke said. That could be bad for buyers who get in at the top of the market and bad for the local economy if high housing costs spur talented workers to move away. “We could have a housing cost-induced economic slowdown because people cant make the housing market work,” Smoke said.

Figuring out how to create enough new housing to meet demand is a tricky question. In one scenario sketched out by Smoke, faster economic growth would lead to higher interest rates, leading banks to lend more easily to homebuyers. In another, a bad economy could slow household growth, dampening demand. Right now, builders are starting new homes at a modest clip despite significant demand, probably because the cost of building them outweigh the prices homes are fetching. “If you were a builder and you could do it, wouldnt you?” Smoke asked.

The current housing market isnt without some pockets of speculation, said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at RealtyTrac. A rule of thumb for investors who flip homes is to buy at a 30 percent discount to the local market, he said. That leaves room to fix up the house and sell at a profit. In the first quarter of 2016, flippers in Denver were buying at a 14 percent discount to market prices, and flippers in Orange County, Calif., were buying at an 11 percent discount.

“Theyre riding the wave of rising home prices,” Blomquist said. “Theyre not buying low—theyre hoping that they can sell high.”

 

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