China credit crunch
June 21, 2013
The interest rate Chinese banks charge to lend money from each other fell to 8.33 percent on Friday, after spiking at 13 percent on Thursday amid signs of a frozen interbank lending market.
The fall of the so-called seven-day repurchase rate had allegedly come after the People's Bank of China (PBoC) had injected 40 billion yuan (4.9 billion euros) into several banks, media reported Friday. The central bank reportedly intervened to ease an acute funding shortage by the Bank of China, which had been unable to complete transactions on Thursday.
On Friday, Bank of China - which is one of the country's four biggest lenders - denied such reports, while PBoC didn't make any public comment on the intervention.
The international credit agency Fitch Ratings announced on Friday, however, that more Chinese institutions could face constraints in meeting payment obligations on the back of restrictive monetary policies pursued by the central bank.
"Such an approach increases repayment risk among banks, and raises the potential for a policy misstep and/or unintended consequences," Fitch reported in a statement.
In recent months, China's central bank has repeatedly expressed concern about an unsustainably high growth rate of credit, saying this was fueling bad investments that threaten to weigh on the country's long-term growth prospects.
PBoC's restrictive monetary policy, however, has led to a squeeze on credit in which institutions are unwilling to lend to each other, as well as to smaller businesses, which have become increasingly dependent on so-called shadow banking.
As banks are scaling back on lending, some economists already warn of threats to economic growth, fearing that the number of bankruptcies could rise in the second half of 2013. Others say the government crackdown on excessive lending is overdue and necessary to address structural problems in the Chinese economy.
uhe/mkg (AFP, AP, dpa)