The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) is set to further reduce regulatory interest rates on May 25, the third cut in a row since mid-March, expected to give a boost to the stagnant real estate market.
One week after the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) reduced the benchmark interest rates, the deposit interest rates in the market continued the downward trend.
Commercial banks have agreed to lower deposit interest rates by about 0.5 percent starting from March 6, while State-owned banks will only reduce their rates by 0.2 percent because they are already at the lowest level in the market.
Many experts said that interest rates in Vietnam are currently too high, so it is necessary to reduce them to support people and enterprises to recover and develop production and business activities.
Vietnam's lending interest rates are higher than many countries in the world, while last year, Vietnam was one of the countries with the lowest inflation level. This paradox needs to be explained to find solutions to ease the burden on businesses.
The State Bank of Vietnam’s (SBV) Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) branch will continue to prioritize credit for production and business, especially in priority sectors, to boost economic recovery.
While a few banks announced cutting lending interest rates to support enterprises to access good capital for production and business activities at the end of the year, in the savings market, deposit interest rates remain hot every day.
After Vietcombank, HDBank has recently announced to lower lending interest rates for enterprises doing business in many industries with a total interest rate reduction of up to VND120 billion.
The recent sharp increase in deposit interest rates has pulled lending interest rates up by 3-4 percent per annum over the same period last year. In the face of highly increasing pressure on the USD/VND exchange rate, deposit interest rates have not cooled down yet, so the pressure on lending interest rates in the peak months of the year is still huge.
In the context of tight credit, capital demand often increases at the end of the year, so the race in the deposit interest rates of commercial banks has been increasingly hot. The highest interest rates on deposit products in the market have reached 8.4 percent per annum. Some banks even have offered the highest 13-month deposit interest rate of up to 8.8 percent per annum, but it is for an extremely large sum of deposits.
Amid the context that central banks of many countries raised interest rates sharply, from September 23, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) decided to increase operating interest rates, which experts assessed as a timely action.
Facing the pressure of increasing prices of goods, many enterprises worry that lending interest rates will stay at a relatively high level in the coming time.
From the end of March to the beginning of April, more commercial banks have increased deposit interest rates from 0.1 to 0.6 percent point based on each term, especially the promotion program that has been applied under online banking.
Deposit interest rates have just been simultaneously raised by commercial banks and are expected to increase further to prepare cash flows in the context that the whole country has returned to a new normal state, and production and business activities have been restored.
The fact that savings interest rates are at the lowest level in history has made the cash flow shift to other investment channels, including real estate. This is also one of the reasons that cause land fever in many provinces across the country.
With an abundant source of money, many banks have launched credit stimulus packages and reduced lending interest rates for corporate and institutional customers.