US$40 Trillion Debt: No Default, But Singapore Could Still Greatly Suffer From Its Actions

Talk of a US debt default on its US$40 trillion debt misunderstands a basic structural fact: the United States borrows in its own currency. Unlike Greece, Argentina, or any nation that owes money in a currency it doesn't control, Washington issues Treasury bonds denominated in dollars, and the Federal Reserve can create dollars at will. This means outright default, in the sense of failing to pay bondholders, is a political choice, not a mathematical necessity. Congress could theoretically refuse to raise the debt ceiling, but the underlying capacity to pay is never actually in doubt: the government can always meet its obligations in nominal terms.

The real risk isn't non-payment; it's the value of the payment. When a government finances mounting debt by expanding the money supply, whether through outright printing or Fed purchases of Treasury debt, it dilutes the purchasing power of every dollar in circulation. That dilution shows up as inflation and, eventually, currency depreciation against other reserve currencies. Bondholders still get paid the face value they were promised. But that face value now buys less.

Singapore's Large Losses when USA Does this

This is where Singapore, in particular, absorbs the cost. A meaningful share of Singapore's foreign reserves and sovereign wealth holdings, through MAS and GIC, sit in US dollar assets, partly to anchor currency stability and partly because Treasuries remain the world's deepest, most liquid safe asset. When the dollar depreciates against the Singapore dollar, every one of those holdings is worth less in SGD terms the moment it's converted or marked to market, even though the nominal USD principal hasn't changed. 

Singapore lent real purchasing power and gets back diminished purchasing power: a quiet erosion of national savings that never appears as a headline default, but functions as one in substance. Because MAS also manages SGD appreciation as a policy tool against imported inflation, a weakening dollar compounds the squeeze, hitting reserve values and complicating monetary policy at the same time. Singapore will greatly suffer

This is why economists describe debt monetization as an "inflation tax": one that falls disproportionately on foreign dollar holders rather than domestic voters, making it politically easier to inflate than to default. For a small, trade-dependent, reserve-heavy economy like Singapore, that tax is paid whether or not it ever signed up for it.

Singapore's Dividend Advantage: Why Income Investors Should Look To Singapore's Stock Market

Singapore's stock market has built a reputation as one of the highest-yielding equity markets in the world, and the numbers back it up. The Straits Times Index (STI) currently offers a dividend yield of around 4% to 4.5%, well ahead of Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index near 3%, and more than double the S&P 500's sub-2% yield. Beyond the blue-chip index, Singapore's deep and mature REIT sector pushes that advantage further, with several counters offering distribution yields of 6% to 9%, a scale rarely matched by developed-market equities.

Three REITs illustrate this well: NTT DC REIT, United Hampshire US REIT, and Lendlease Global Commercial REIT.

NTT DC REIT (SGX: NTDU) 

A data centre REIT, exposed to the AI boom, NTT DC REIT has a current forward yield of about 8 to 8.5%/ The REIT owns six data centres across California, Virginia, Vienna, and Singapore, anchored by NTT's global tenant base. First-half FY2025/26 results beat IPO forecasts, with net property income and distributable income ahead of projections by 1.7% and 3.3% respectively. Occupancy stood at 95.1%, positive rental reversions came in at 5.1%, and a weighted average lease expiry of 4.4 years gives income visibility through the decade. Gearing of just 32.5%, an interest coverage ratio of 4.1 times, and 70% of debt fixed or hedged, all support the durability of the payout.

United Hampshire US REIT (SGX: ODBU) 

It owns grocery-anchored and necessity-based retail properties, plus self-storage assets, across the US East Coast. Grocery and necessity occupancy reached 97.7%, WALE extended to 8.0 years, and distributable income grew 10% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026. Gearing stands at 41.1%, with no refinancing required until 2028, a meaningful buffer against near-term rate volatility. With a forward yield of 8.5% at 49 US cents, the REIT looks bound to have increasing DPU with the onboard rent-generating from its new built shopping mall extension and the rental escalations built into contracts

Lendlease Global Commercial REIT (SGX: JYEU) 

An almost 100% Singapore concentrated REIT, Lendlease offers a trailing yield of around 6.5% to 7%, with FY2026 forecasts pointing toward roughly 7.4%. Its portfolio spans Jem, 313@Somerset, and the newly fully-owned PLQ Mall in Singapore, plus the Sky Complex office towers in Milan. Portfolio occupancy improved to 95.3% as of March 2026, retail occupancy held at 99.7%, and retail rental reversion came in positive at 12.2% for the third quarter of FY2026. Gearing of 38.7% remains comfortably within regulatory limits.

What ties these three together is sustainability, not just headline yield. Each maintains gearing well inside the Monetary Authority of Singapore's 50% leverage ceiling for REITs, positive rental reversions, and multi-year lease profiles — the hallmarks of distributions funded by growing operating income rather than capital erosion.

The yield gap against "risk-free" benchmarks is striking. Singapore's own 10-year government bond currently yields around 2.3%, while even the US 30-year Treasury, near a near-two-decade high of roughly 5.3%, still falls short of what these REITs pay out. That leaves a spread of several hundred basis points for investors willing to take on equity market risk in exchange for income growing well above global benchmark rates.

For income-focused investors in any part of the world, Singapore's REIT sector remains one of the most compelling dividend stories in global markets today. What's more Singapore does not levy a dividend tax

Lendlease REIT: 6.3% Yield, Falling Debt, the Best and Most Undervalued Singapore Mall REIT

Trading at around S$0.585, Lendlease Global Commercial REIT (SGX: JYEU) looks, on the numbers, like one of the more underappreciated names in the Singapore retail S-REIT space. A market-beating yield, a shrinking debt load, and accelerating rental growth don't usually coexist with a unit price sitting near the bottom of its 52-week range — yet that's the setup here.

A Yield That Holds Up Well Against Retail S-REIT Peers

Lendlease REIT's ("L-REIT") showed a Distribution Per Unit (DPU) of 1.85 Singapore cents, up 3.1% year-on-year. Annualised against its share price, that works out to a yield of roughly 6.3%. With both 1H and 2H financial results proving that the REIT is likely to be consistenly announing 1.85 Sg cents.

For context, here's how that stacks up against the broader retail-REIT peer set:

Lendlease REIT: 6.3%

Suntec REIT: 5.5%

Frasers Centrepoint Trust (FCT): ~5.3–5.8%

CapitaLand Integrated Commercial Trust (CICT): ~5.1%

Against CICT and FCT — the two largest, most liquid domestic retail landlords, and the most directly comparable names — LREIT's yield premium of 100+ basis points is a meaningful gap, and it comes at a time when its balance sheet metrics are improving rather than deteriorating.

So the more like-for-like comparison — Singapore-anchored, domestically focused retail landlords — still favours LREIT on yield.

Leverage Trending Down, Competitive Within the Peer Set

Gearing stood at 38.9% but the amount of Perpetuals in L-REIT's balance Sheet has reduced

Stacked against the wider retail-REIT peer set:

• FCT: gearing of 40.3–40.4% as at end-FY2026 (though FCT has separately flagged a pro forma reduction to ~36.5% following the proposed divestment of White Sands mall)
• CICT: gearing in the 38.6–39.2% range
• Suntec REIT: 41.5%

LREIT's leverage is now clearly below FCT's and Suntec's reported figure and broadly in line with CICT's.  

Retail Rental Reversions Are Growing

Operationally, the retail portfolio is doing the heavy lifting. Positive rental reversion for L-REIT units has come in at double digits. 

Cutting the Expensive Perpetual Securities Down by 40%

One of the more overlooked parts of the story is what management has done to the REIT's perpetual securities — a historically expensive layer of hybrid capital that sits above senior debt in the cost stack.

LREIT previously carried S$400 million in perpetual securities across two S$200 million tranches. Through two refinancing rounds:

• April 2025: S$200 million of perpetuals refinanced, replaced with S$120 million of new (lower-coupon) issuance plus additional lower-cost loans, bringing the balance down to ~S$320 million.
• April 2026: A further S$120 million in new perpetual securities was issued at 4.28% p.a. to partially refinance the remaining S$200 million tranche that matured in June 2026, with the balance addressed through existing debt capacity.

Net result: perpetual securities outstanding have fallen from S$400 million to roughly S$240 million — a 40% reduction. Since perpetual distributions are typically more expensive than senior debt and rank ahead of unitholder distributions, shrinking this layer directly frees up more income for unitholders.

As a result, ICR is now 2.1 times, a large improvement.

Bottom Line: Best Singapore Focused Shopping Mall REITs

Lendlease REIT's latest results show a REIT genuinely repairing its balance sheet while its underlying retail portfolio accelerates. With a higher yield than CICT and FCT which are Singapore malls focused, L-REIT is indeed an undervalued gem and income investors could consider buying L-REIT for its dividend up to 65 Singapore cents and holding it to 68 Singapore cents

How You Can Save More Money than Other Singaporeans Using the ETS from Singapore to KL

Most Singaporeans default to flying to KL. It's the obvious choice — 75 minutes in the air beats a four-hour-plus train ride, so why would anyone think twice? I did. And the moment I actually put ETS and flight prices side by side, the "obvious choice" stopped looking so obvious.

Economy ETS Seat: RM110 vs a Scoot seat

An ETS ticket runs about RM110 one-way. At today's exchange rate (roughly RM3.18 to S$1), that converts to S$34.60.

A Scoot flight on the same route is currently pricing around S$83 one-way for a standard economy seat, before baggage or seat selection are added on.

That's a gap of about S$48.40 — the train comes in 58% cheaper.

Business ETS Seat: RM165 vs an SIA seat

Same story at the top end. ETS Business Class — extra legroom, wider seats, priority boarding — costs RM165, or S$51.90.

A Singapore Airlines economy seat on the same route runs about S$220.

That's S$168.10 saved, or 76% cheaper — and worth noting, that's the ETS's premium class against SIA's standard one. There's no equivalent luxury tier on the rail side; RM165 is about as good as the train gets, and it's still cheaper than a basic plane seat. (SIA fares can also climb well past S$220 depending on season — so on some dates, the gap is bigger than this.)

The Opportunity Cost of Time

Granted on a whole the journey time via ETS is slower in the city, but I think this is justified, Let's compare the time difference

✈️ Flying:

• Journey Time to Changi Airport (MRT via Tanah Merah): 40m
• Arrive ahead of check-in: 1h 30m
• Flight time (SIN–KUL): 1h 15m
• Immigration + baggage at KLIA: ~20m
• KLIA to KL city centre by car: 1h 00m
• Total: 4h 45m

🚆 Train (Location → Woodlands Checkpoint  → ETS):

• To Woodlands Checkpoint: ~1hr 15 m
• Immigration clearance + crossing, both nodes: 20m
• Walk CIQ to JB Sentral and Boarding: ~20m
• ETS, JB Sentral to KL Sentral: 4h 20m
• KL Sentral to KL city centre by car: 15m
• Total: 6h 30m

Yes, I do lose roughly 2.5 hours in travel time — but for a saving of $48.40 to $168.10, that's an easy trade to make. And once the RTS Link opens, crossing into Johor Bahru gets quicker and far more reliable, even if it won't dramatically shrink that time gap on its own. Time cost aside, this isn't a marginal win — it's a genuine financial hack, and it's the train, not the flight, that has it.

The Great Stock Market Contradiction: Why BYD's Bigger Numbers Buy a Smaller Price Tag

If the stock market were a simple scoreboard — most revenue wins, most profit wins, most units sold wins — BYD would be beating Tesla on every count. And yet Tesla is worth roughly ten times more. This isn't a myth or an internet exaggeration. It's real, it's current, and it's one of the clearest illustrations of how disconnected a stock's price can be from a company's underlying business.

The Fact-Check

For full-year 2025:

• Revenue: BYD generated about $116 billion (803.96 billion yuan), versus Tesla's $94.8 billion. BYD wins by roughly 23%.
• Net profit: BYD earned about $4.7 billion, versus Tesla's $3.8 billion GAAP net income. BYD wins here too, even though BYD's own profit fell 19% year-over-year due to a brutal domestic price war in China.
• Vehicles sold: BYD delivered 4.6 million vehicles (EVs and plug-in hybrids combined) — nearly triple Tesla's 1.64 million. Even narrowing it to pure battery-electric vehicles only, BYD's 2.26 million still outsold Tesla's 1.64 million.

Despite sweeping all three categories, BYD's market capitalization sits at roughly $110–125 billion. Tesla's sits at approximately $1.2 trillion. Tesla is worth somewhere between 10 and 11 times as much as a company that outsold it, out-earned it, and out-revenued it.

Why the Market Doesn't Care About the Scoreboard

The resolution to this apparent contradiction is that a stock price isn't a report card on the past year — it's a bet on the future. Markets assign value based on expected future cash flows, discounted by how confident investors are in getting them, not on which company had the better trailing twelve months.

Look at the valuation multiples this produces. Tesla trades at roughly 12–13 times sales and over 300 times earnings. BYD trades at roughly 1 times sales and about 24 times earnings. Investors aren't pricing Tesla as a car company; they're pricing it as a bet on autonomous robotaxis, Full Self-Driving (FSD) software subscriptions, humanoid robots (Optimus), and grid-scale energy storage — businesses that barely register in Tesla's current revenue but loom large in its imagined future. BYD, meanwhile, is priced closer to what it visibly is today: a high-volume, thin-margin manufacturer competing in an increasingly brutal price war.

There are other forces at work too. BYD's shares are split across Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and thinly-traded U.S. ADRs, which fragments and discounts its valuation relative to a single, highly liquid U.S.-listed mega-cap like Tesla. Geopolitical risk, less transparent Chinese corporate governance, and a smaller base of Western institutional ownership all add a "discount" that has nothing to do with BYD's factories or balance sheet.

Yet BYD is Technologically Superior to Tesla

On Full Self-Driving (FSD), the assessment indicates that BYD's position is more defensible than Tesla's branding may suggest. BYD's "God's Eye" autonomous driving system is available across three tiers, with the top two incorporating LiDAR sensors—hardware that Tesla has deliberately excluded in favor of a camera-only approach. Reports indicate that the entry-level God’s Eye system averages more than 1,000 km between human interventions, is offered as standard on vehicles priced below $10,000, and, notably, BYD accepts liability for accidents occurring while the system is engaged.

In contrast, Tesla has marketed its system as "Full Self-Driving" but has not assumed liability for accidents involving the technology. Furthermore, a U.S. jury assigned Tesla partial responsibility in a fatal incident involving its Autopilot system. This highlights a meaningful distinction between Tesla's branding, which projects a high degree of confidence in its autonomous driving capabilities, and the legal responsibility it is willing to undertake.

The Real Lesson

This is really the same mechanism explored in questions about dividend yield and stock prices: value isn't just today's numbers divided by today's price — it's tomorrow's expected numbers, discounted by how much risk or uncertainty investors attach to them. A stock market can look "irrational" comparing two companies side by side on last year's results, while still being entirely rational once you account for what each company is being trusted, or not trusted, to become.

However, for Tesla's case, this may not hold true and it is very much an over valued stock due to marketing hype and a cult following which borders on unwise and cult like behaviour of a group of investors. Earnings have stagnated as well and the promised land of exponential earnings a false dawn.

An AI Blueprint to Closing NTT DC REIT's NAV Gap

NTT DC REIT trades at 0.85 times net asset value — a discount that, notably, is not shared broadly across its Singapore-listed peers. That distinction matters. A sector-wide re-rating would point to macro forces: rate expectations, capital flows, sentiment toward the asset class as a whole. A REIT-specific discount points somewhere narrower — the market is pricing something particular to this portfolio.

Three features of the book explain most of it. First, concentration: the top two tenants account for 44% of base rent and the top ten for 75.4%, with a single tenant — an investment-grade multinational corporate — representing 31.5% on its own. That tenant's lease is unusually strong: seven years, with rental escalations and onerous penalty even on early exit. But headline screens used by many analysts and index providers weight concentration by share of income, not by lease enforceability or counterparty credit quality — so a genuinely well-protected exposure still reads, on paper, as a single-name risk. Second, geography: 63.9% of the portfolio sits in one country/sector. Third, and easy to overlook, is the balance sheet itself. At 31% gearing against a 50% regulatory ceiling, and an interest coverage ratio of 4.2 times against a 1.5 times floor, NTT DC REIT is carrying meaningfully more debt capacity than it is using. Unused capacity, left unused long enough, tends to read to the market not as prudence but as inertia.

There's a fourth, quieter issue: strip out the largest tenant and the remaining portfolio's weighted lease life falls to roughly 2.9 years, well short of the 4.2-year blended average. That's near-term rollover risk arriving independently of the concentration story, and it adds earnings uncertainty the market has to price somewhere.

With all the facts in hand, I ran the scenario through an AI model set to its 'Extra' effort setting — reportedly the second-highest reasoning level available. Here's the output it generated:

Closing the Gap: The Capital Allocation Playbook

None of these four issues is fixed by inaction, and none is fixed by picking just one lever.

Run the unit buyback toward the full 10% mandate permitted under its renewed unit buyback, funded from debt or cash rather than equity. At 0.85x NAV, every dollar spent buys back roughly $1.18 of underlying value — a rare, close-to-certain return. With a high daily turnover near 1% of market cap, there is no liquidity or float constraint forcing restraint; the mandate ceiling, not market depth, is the real limit.

In parallel, continue acquiring — not for size, but for diversification. Future deals should be screened for what actually narrows the top-ten and geographic numbers, since the largest tenant's contractual strength already limits the urgency of diluting that specific exposure through growth. Debt headroom supports this: roughly 30% of the current asset base can still be added before the leverage ceiling binds, with even more room on the ICR side. Fund this growth with debt, not fresh units — issuing equity at a discount to NAV gives away the very value the buyback is trying to capture.

Address the rollover risk in the rest of the portfolio directly, through proactive re-leasing and targeted capital expenditure, rather than letting it compete unaddressed against the other two priorities for the same debt capacity.

Finally, communicate the plan via an SGX announcement. If part of the discount reflects unused balance sheet capacity rather than the underlying risk itself, visibly deploying that capacity — and explaining why — will do more for the rating than either lever pulled quietly on its own

Expect a partial, not full, re-rating from the buyback alone. If the discount narrows only modestly once the mandate is used, that confirms the market's real concern is concentration and geographic mix — meaning the acquisition program, not the buyback, holds the key to closing what remains.

<Author is vested in NTT DC REIT>

Why Singapore's IPOs Keep Going Underwater and the Stock Market Flounders: The Tools Are There, But the Bureaucracy Just Doesn't Have the Will

Two SGX listings landed with a thud in the past two months. JustCo closed its first trading day almost 18% below its offer price. Foundation Healthcare, backed by Temasek's SeaTown, had to settle for the floor of its price range despite becoming the largest healthcare IPO since 2012. Read in isolation, both look like evidence that Singaporeans just aren't excited about Singapore stocks.

Read differently, they're evidence of something narrower and more fixable: Singapore doesn't have a returns problem. It has an awareness problem.

The Numbers Nobody's Advertising

The Straits Times Index rose 23% in 2025. In my own writing last month, I ran the actual math comparing a S$1,000,000 unleveraged basket of ten SGX REITs against the same S$1,000,000 used as a 25% deposit on a 75%-geared, rented-out condo. The REIT basket returned a blended 6.68% a year in cash — tax-free, no mortgage, no stamp duty, instant liquidity. The leveraged property, even under generous interest-only assumptions, nets closer to 5.2% after financing and tax, and that's before roughly S$200,000 in stamp duty and legal fees paid just to enter the trade. Over ten years, the gap compounds to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the REIT basket's favour, on identical starting capital.

That's not a marginal result, and it isn't a secret either. MAS has been quietly building the institutional case for Singapore equities for over a year — S$6.5 billion allocated to asset managers under the Equity Market Development Programme, new rules requiring family offices under the Global Investor Programme to deploy meaningful capital into SGX names, board lot sizes cut from 100 to 10 units specifically to make it easier for small investors to buy in. All real, all sensible, and all invisible to the average Singaporean scrolling their phone.

Why the Message Never Reaches Singaporeans

Property has an entire content industry built around selling it: short-form videos, "your tenant pays your mortgage" calculators, agents with six-figure follower counts making the leverage story feel intuitive and inevitable. Nothing on the stock side competes with that, because nothing is designed to. Retail investors don't lack access — brokerage accounts are a five-minute sign-up. They lack a version of the property pitch that's been made for stocks, in the same format, with the same repetition, using real numbers.

That's a solvable gap, and MAS and the Ministry of Finance are two of the few institutions with both the credibility and the reach to close it. A short-form social campaign that simply states, plainly, what a diversified SGX REIT basket returned this year against what a leveraged rental unit actually nets after stamp duty and tax would do more for retail participation than another tax incentive aimed at fund managers — because it fixes the actual bottleneck, which is awareness, not capital supply.

The Catch

Here's the trade-off. A campaign that credibly shows stocks beating leveraged property is also a campaign that talks down the primary asset class of Singapore's most established wealth — households and family offices still holding much of their balance sheet in real estate, with real influence over how economic policy gets discussed and shaped. It also unsettles a newer cohort: professionals who leveraged into a second or third unit specifically to rent to expatriates, and who've built both a balance sheet and an identity around that bet. Hearing, on an official channel, that the math was against them the whole time isn't just an inconvenient fact — it's a status challenge from a source they didn't expect it from.

There's a subtler tension too. CPF and HDB upgrading have spent decades reinforcing housing as a retirement asset for the median household, not just the wealthy. A regulator pushing consumers toward equities and a housing system that depends on property values holding up aren't fully pulling in the same direction, even before anyone's politics enters the picture. One ministry's social media campaign may anger one or two other ministries' political office holders.

So the billions keep flowing quietly to institutions, and the board lots keep shrinking to lower the entry barrier — real progress, but all on the supply side. The blunt, retail-facing version of the pitch — REIT yield next to rental yield, tax-free against taxed, no stamp duty against six figures of it — still hasn't been made. It is up to MAS and MOF to have the (iron) will to speak up. As for Singaporeans, they lose a voice which raises their awareness in helping to build for their financial future.