Business / Opinion

No financial meltdown in sight

By Yu Yongding (China Daily) Updated: 2014-04-15 07:19

There will not be a banking crash, as the authorities still have policy capacity to address the problems and ensure stability

The market is always in search of a story and its corresponding trade idea. Unfortunately, so far this year, the United States, eurozone and Japan have been rather uncooperative on this matter, as their respective central banks and economies have stuck to prior trends. As a result, investors have turned to China in the hope of securing this year's story.

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Indeed, the economic challenges facing China in 2014 are serious. Its growth rate has fallen from 10.4 percent in 2010 to 7.7 percent in 2013. The most recent economic statistics show that the economy is still slowing. More ominously, the black clouds of debt seem to have thickened inexorably. The high-profile corporate bond default in March, the first in many years, sent a chill through markets in the spring. China's slowdown and financial risks have led to a wave of pessimism and potential opportunity for the market: either a big "China short" is coming, or risk appetite should anticipate a major fillip as authorities have to reflate through credit and/or fiscal stimulus.

However, although the economy may slow further, it is unlikely that the decline in the growth rate will be so large that the government has to usher in a large stimulus package; financial instability exists, but the resources available to the government to ensure stability are still plentiful.

Currently, the bearish predictions of an imminent crisis in China are mostly based on the fact that China's leverage ratio is too high. It is argued that those developing countries that have had a credit boom nearly as big as China's all experienced a credit crisis and a major economic slowdown.

Yes, China's debt-to-GDP ratio is very high, but so are the debt-to-GDP ratios in many successful East Asian economies, such as Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. The difference is that China's savings rate is much higher than most of them. All other things being equal, the higher the savings rate, the less likely it is that a high debt-to-GDP ratio will trigger a financial crisis. In fact, China's high debt-to-GDP ratio, to a large extent, is a result of China's high savings rate vis-a-vis its equally high investment rate. Certainly, the inability to repay would contribute to the high debt-to-GDP ratio, but so far the nonperforming ratio for China's major banks is still less than 1 percent.