|
20110603 Follow Me 24
followme, 英语, followus
求职招聘 经管微博
经管百科 三人行网
我也想创建词条赚积分
Chinese public debt
Coming clean
China faces up to the hidden debts of its local governments
BANKS in Western countries dragged their economies into the great recession. Banks in China pulled the country out of it. Much of the Chinese government’s stimulus effort from 2008 to 2010 was left to financial institutions, which proved better at shoving money out of the door than America’s federal government.
The banks lent to thousands of investment corporations set up by local governments, which cannot borrow in their own name. With the help of some initial capital and collateral, like land, these investment vehicles directed the lending into local bridges, tunnels and real-estate ventures. But many of the loans have turned bad, threatening the balance-sheets of the banks that made them.
Now the central government has at last resolved to clean up the mess, according to unnamed officials cited by Reuters this week. China’s government will consolidate thousands of investment vehicles and hive off some of their debts into separate companies open to private investors. It will force the banks to write off another slice of the bad debt, and repay a chunk of it from its own budget. Much of the stimulus lending of 2008-10 may turn out to be public spending after all.
The government has never revealed how much debt the local-government vehicles took on. Despite this opacity, or perhaps because of it, these hidden liabilities have become one of the four big worries haunting China-watchers, along with the property bubble, inflation and lightly regulated trust companies. Victor Shih of Northwestern University has described the debts as a “big rock-candy mountain”. In June 2010, he projected it might reach as high as 24 trillion yuan ($3.7 trillion) by the end of 2012, or over half of China’s GDP.
But the central government itself now reckons the debts amount to 10 trillion yuan, according to an official cited by Reuters—a quarter of GDP. That is bigger than America’s state and local-government debt (18%) but the same as India’s (25%).
|