China to balance stable growth and risk prevention: central bank

[October 21, 2020]  BEIJING (Reuters) - China will strike a balance between stabilising economic growth and preventing risks, even as debt was allowed to temporarily rise this year to support the coronavirus-hit economy, the head of the central bank Yi Gang said on Wednesday.

Yi, the governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), told a financial forum in Beijing that he expected China's macro leverage ratio to stabilise next year as the economy expands, after the debt gauge rose in 2020.

Bank lending in the first nine months totalled 16.26 trillion yuan ($2.44 trillion) as policymakers looked to reboot economic activity, beating a previous peak of 13.63 trillion yuan in the same period last year.

"Monetary policy needs to guard the 'gates' of money supply, and properly smooth out fluctuations in the macro leverage ratio, and keep it on a reasonable track in the long run," Yi said.
 

In July, Ruan Jianhong, head of the PBOC's statistics department, said that the country's macro leverage ratio jumped 14.5 percentage points in the first quarter and climbed further in the second quarter.

The macro leverage ratio is a measurement of the debt held by Chinese governments, households and companies divided by total gross domestic product (GDP).

The central bank has not given further details on the figure.

The Institute for International Finance (IIF) said in July that China's debt-to-GDP ratio was on track to hit 335%, from nearly 318% in the first quarter.

At the same forum, PBOC Vice Governor Pan Gongsheng said that the central bank had prepared a draft to improve macro prudential assessments, which measure weaknesses in financial systems, for the property finance sector.

Governor of People's Bank of China (PBOC) Yi Gang attends a news conference on China's economic development ahead of the 70th anniversary of its founding, in Beijing, China September 24, 2019. REUTERS/Florence Lo

PBOC will look into indicators including the concentration ratio of property loans, the ratio of household debt to total income, and the risk-weighting of property loans, said Pan.

A list of China's systemically important banks, and detailed regulations for them, will be revealed in the near term, he added.

Also at the forum, Vice Premier Liu He said the economy will very likely grow this year, adding that prudent monetary policy should be kept appropriate and flexible, and liquidity reasonably ample.

On Monday, China reported its GDP grew 0.7% in January to September from a year earlier, versus a contraction of 1.6% in the first half following the coronavirus outbreak.

Speaking on a separate panel at Wednesday's forum, Yi warned that financial technology, while making services more convenient, has created data gaps and faces problems when it comes to protecting business secrets and personal privacy.

Public and government information "must be more transparent... (but) what must be protected must be protected," he said.

(Reporting by Binbin Huang, Cheng Leng and Ryan Woo; additional writing by Tom Daly; Editing by Kim Coghill and Christian Schmollinger)

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