A vendor counts money at a pork stall at the Shekou wet market in Shenzhen.
China’s broadest measure of new credit fell 19 percent from a year earlier and money supply grew at the slowest pace since 2001, underscoring risks of a deeper slowdown as the government tries to curb financial dangers.
Aggregate financing was 2.07 trillion yuan ($333 billion) in March, the People’s Bank of China said in Beijing today, down from 2.55 trillion yuan a year ago. M2, China’s broadest gauge of money supply, rose 12.1 percent from a year earlier, compared with the 13 percent median estimate of analysts in a Bloomberg News survey and 13.3 percent in February.
Policy makers are trying to rein in a credit binge and prevent defaults from spurring broader financial turmoil, while meeting a target for economic expansion of about 7.5 percent this year. The State Council earlier this month outlined what some analysts have dubbed a “mini-stimulus” package of railway spending and tax relief, with first-quarter growth projected to be the slowest since 2009 in a report due tomorrow.
“Very weak deposit growth reinforces our view” that the central bank needs to cut banks’ reserve requirements in the second quarter, said Zhang Zhiwei, chief China economist at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong. “Otherwise monetary growth will continue to slow and GDP growth will drop below 7 percent” in the second or third quarters, he said in an e-mail.
Yuan deposits rose 3.67 trillion yuan in March from the previous month, slower than last year’s increase, the PBOC said today.
The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index of stocks extended losses after the report and was down 1 percent at 10:38 a.m. local time. The yuan weakened 0.1 percent to 6.2246 per dollar and is down about 2.7 percent this year, the most among 11 Asian currencies tracked by Bloomberg.
Foreign reserves
China’s foreign-exchange reserves, the world’s largest, rose to $3.95 trillion at the end of March from $3.82 trillion at the end of December, according to the PBOC report. The increase shows the yuan’s weakening is a result of “heavy intervention” by the central bank, Liu Li-Gang, chief Greater China economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. in Hong Kong, said in an e-mail.
Aggregate financing compared with the 1.85 trillion yuan median projection in a Bloomberg News survey. New yuan loans were 1.05 trillion yuan, compared with the 1 trillion yuan median estimate of economists.
The central bank has shown little intent to relax monetary policy. A day after the cabinet announced the pro-growth measures, the central bank said in a statement after a quarterly monetary-policy meeting that it will maintain “moderate liquidity” and “realize reasonable growth in loans and social financing,” reiterating language from a previous statement.
Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank governor, said last week that the nation needs only minor policy adjustments when growth is within a normal range, adding to signals that the government will avoid taking broader action for now to counter the slowdown. Premier Li Keqiang said last week that the government won’t adopt “short-term and strong stimulus policies in response to temporary fluctuations in the economy.”
The National Bureau of Statistics reports tomorrow on first-quarter gross domestic product and fixed-asset investment, along with March industrial production and retail sales. The world’s second-largest economy probably expanded 7.3 percent from a year earlier, decelerating from 7.7 percent in the previous period, based on the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of analysts.
The Vinh
Đăng ký: VietNam News
