Banking News
- Regulator guides banks to cool loan growth
Date: 20-Nov-2007 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
THE banking regulator said it was giving 'guidance?to banks to cool lending that had already topped its goal of 15 percent growth this year and threatened to overheat the world's fastest-growing major economy.
The China Banking Regulatory Commission denied a Wall Street Journal report yesterday that it had ordered banks to freeze this year's lending at Oct. 31 levels. A 15 percent ceiling on loan growth is 'informal guidance, not a hard target,'said Lai Xiaomin, the commission's Beijing-based spokesman.
Record trade surpluses have pumped cash into China, threatening to stoke inflation, asset bubbles and investment leading to overcapacity in manufacturing. The central bank has raised the benchmark one-year lending rate by 1.17 percentage points this year to 7.29 percent and ordered commercial lenders to set aside larger reserves.
'Reserve-ratio requirement hikes and rate hikes have not been able to slow bank lending growth this year,'' said Sun Mingchun, an economist at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong. 'Therefore, the government has to rely on this non-market type of monetary policy tool.'
Chinese banks extended 3.5 trillion yuan (US$471 billion) of new loans in the first 10 months, a 15.6 percent increase from loans outstanding at the end of last year, according to central bank data.
'Banks that exceed the 15 percent cap will face regulatory obstacles in applying for a new branch opening or new product lines,'' said Li Shanshan, a Shenzhen-based analyst at China Merchants Securities Co. 'Therefore, banks still have an incentive to obey what the government says.''
Lending is biggest early in the year 'so slower lending in the remaining two months won't have a significant impact on their bottom lines,'' said Li. Average loan growth of big State-owned banks this year is about 15 percent versus about 20 percent for small and medium-sized lenders, the analyst said.
The regulator last week told State banks to curb lending, citing the 15 percent target, according to the Shanghai Securities News.
Another newspaper, China Business News, reported last week that overseas banks were told to tighten lending to real estate developers.
'We don't subject banks to hard-and-fast lending caps since individual banks have such different business needs,'' said the regulator's Lai. 'What we want is a reasonable pace of loans growth, dependent on each bank's capital-adequacy ratio, and the risk and quality of its loan portfolio.''
The central bank this month ordered lenders to set aside more money as reserves for the ninth time this year, raising the ratio to 13.5 percent, the highest since at least 1987.
Government efforts to guide lending illustrate its reluctance to 'raise rates too much or let the yuan appreciate faster'' to curb liquidity, according to Wang Tao, head of economics and strategy for Greater China at the Bank of America Corp. in Beijing.
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