By Li Zengxin (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2007-07-06 17:23

China's financial reform has been successful in the past four years, said Sir Howard Davies in a speech on his China tour this week. But there are remaining problems, such as a high dependency on bank deposits and a small scale of the financial market. The deeper the reform goes, the more difficult tasks it will face, Davies said.

Davies, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and former deputy governor of Bank of England, was on a tour of Beijing this week and made a speech on China's financial reform at the LSE alumni event on July 2.

After the speech, the advisor to China's banking and securities regulators talked more of his view on China's economic development, in an exclusive interview withwww.chinadaily.com.cn.

Davies believes the country's efforts towards reforming the state commercial banks were successful. He said the public listings by three of the Big Four banks - the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China and China Construction Bank - helped them introduce strategic investors, load off burdens from non-performing loans (NPLs) and upgrade internal management.

"The strategy is correct," Davies said. "In the past, no one hears about Chinese banks, (but) now they are on top of the world's largest bank list in terms of assets and competing with first-class global banks."

Davies also noted that the deeper reform goes, the harder missions it will need to accomplish, referring to the Agriculture Bank of China, the last of the Big Four yet to complete a reform, with the largest nation-wide network and the highest NPL ratio.

China's securities brokers are much weaker than the banks and there is still a long way to go in the reform, said Davies. Reshuffling by mergers and acquisitions are under way, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) is stepping up efforts in supervision of the industry. "China needs to develop its derivatives market," Davies said.

On China's heated stock market, Davies said the regulators, especially the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) and CSRC, need to be particularly "vigilant" on bank loans entering the stock market. They must prevent such incidents, Davies said.

Asked about how the country may curb bubbles in the stock market, Davies said in fact there is no proven method to control such bubbles. All countries are trying their best on a trial-and-error basis to do so, he said. Improved regulation and supervision is needed.

"You can't legislate or control optimism, after all," Davies said. "The key is to find out where the holdings are." China has 90 million individual investors now, 30 million of which are new investors that just opened their accounts this year.

"For the country, the most important thing is to ensure these investors are not hurt. These new retail investors are rather 'amateur' compared with others. For the large investors including institutions, if they lose, it's regretful. But that's all, because they are at their own risks. But for the smaller ones, the most urgent task is to educate to make them beware of the risks."

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