China’s massive banking problem

July 6, 2010 at 3:34 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged china

China’s banking sector has a serious problem with bad loans that is not getting as much attention as it should.

Professor Pettis at Peking University explains that (bolds mine)

“in China, even if you believe that all the NPLs currently in the banking system have been correctly identified (a claim which few Chinese bankers believe), no one doubts we are about to see a surge in NPLs thanks to the out-of-control lending expansion of the past two years.  But things are even worse than the nominal numbers imply.  As I discussed in my April 6 entry, when we are trying to estimate the cost of a banking crisis we need to think about more than simply the ability of borrowers to meet current obligations.

This is because, as in the case of the Japanese government obligations, when borrowers are able to benefit from artificially low interest rates, the effect is of hidden debt forgiveness which must be paid for by the net lenders, who are, as in the case of Japan, the beleaguered households.  In other words, if you want to know how much real bad debt there is out there that must be cleaned up, you need to calculate what share of the loans would go bad if interest rates were raised by at least 300-400 basis points, the minimum needed to bring Chinese interest rates in line with an appropriate rate.  This suggests that the Chinese banks, if obligations were correctly counted, might have much larger amounts of bad debt than any of us realize, and this needs directly or indirectly to be cleaned up.”

Here are some recent reports from financial press sources regarding the health China’s banking sector:

-“SHANGHAI -(Dow Jones)- The non-performing loan ratio in China’s banking industry declined to 1.58% by the end of 2009, 0.84 percentage point lower than the figure at the beginning of 2009, China’s banking regulator said Saturday.”(1)

-“BEIJING: Chinese financial institutions’ non-performing loans (NPL) ratio edged down 0.1 percentage points to 1.48 percent in January, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) said Friday.”(2)

-“BEIJING, Apr 14, 2010 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) — Non-performing loan (NPL) ratio of China Development Bank, a policy bank, had reached 0.85% by the end of March”(3)

I don’t believe those reported percentages are accurate.

For context, here is an analysis of China’s non performing loan issue from 2002:

“Standard and Poor’s (S&P), which rates China as investment grade, said on Thursday it would take Chinese banks 10 to 20 years to cut average non-performing loans (NPLs) ratio to a manageable five per cent.

It estimates the Chinese banking sector’s average NPL ratio is atleast 50 per cent, higher than the 30 per cent estimate of China’s central bank governor Dai Xianglong.

“The cost of necessary write-offs could be equivalent to $518 billion or almost half of China’s estimated gross domestic product of $1.1 trillion for 2001,” Mr Terry Chan, a S&P director in Hong Kong said.

The agency said China would be unlikely to cut NPLs in its banking sector to 15 per cent within five years, as its central bank wishes, given the current operating performance of the sector.”

I seriously doubt that the problem identified in 2002 has been resolved yet.  There is an analysis here that supports my assertion.

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