China's bank debts will bite

Five or six years ago, a few sceptics first started pointing out that the credit dynamics underlying Chinese growth was creating an unsustainable increase in debt. This, they warned, would ultimately undermine the banking system and cause growth to collapse if it were not addressed in time.

There were three standard rejoinders to the warnings. First, analysts argued that investment was not being misallocated, and because credit growth poured mostly into investment, it did not therefore follow, as the sceptics argued, that debt was rising faster than debt servicing capacity. Although I think few analysts still support this argument, there remain some analysts who do not think China has an overinvestment problem.

The second rejoinder, which has also largely faded away as an argument over the past few years, is that debt in China doesn’t matter. Sometimes, these analysts argue, it doesn’t matter because it is funded domestically. Sometimes it doesn’t matter because the banks are implicitly guaranteed by the central government. Sometimes it doesn’t matter because China was able to resolve its last debt crisis, 10-15 years ago, in an environment of rapid growth and at no cost, and so of course it can do so again.

…Debt always matters. Either it must be repaid out of the proceeds of the investment that was funded by the debt, or – if the debt funded consumption or was misallocated into insufficiently productive investments – it must be repaid by transfers from some other sector of the economy, and these transfers reduce growth by reducing real demand.

The third rejoinder should have been, in principle, the easiest to refute, and for a while it looked like it had been refuted to everyone’s satisfaction, but in the past year I have seen a revival. China doesn’t have to worry about rising bad debts in its banking sector, according to this argument, because the PBoC’s extensive reserves will make it easy to recapitalise the banks.

Ray Chan, of the South China Morning Post, for example, had an interesting article that made this point. He started off the article by warning that the rapid growth in credit in China has uneasy parallels with rapid credit growth in the US before the 2007 crisis.

The article does a good job of listing many of the problems that have emerged in the past few years, but then quotes a number of analysts who argue that China’s problems is very different from that of the US and it is unlikely to suffer the same kind of crisis. The article continues:

“China’s credit situation is somewhat different, though, as it has a high saving rate and massive foreign reserves. Mervyn Davies, a former head of Standard Chartered and British government minister, said: “China is very rich in reserves … At the end of the day, the [Chinese] banks do need recapitalising, which is not a huge challenge to them because the government can recapitalise the banks.”

I agree that China is in a very different position than the US, but this isn’t necessarily a good thing. The main relevant difference is that because all the banks are perceived to be guaranteed by the central government, and Chinese households have a limited number of ways to save outside the banking system, it is unlikely that China will experience a system-wide bank run as long as the credibility of the guarantee survives, and runs on individual banks can be resolved by regulatory fiat (banks that receive deposits will be forced to lend to banks that lose deposits). We are not likely to see a Lehman-style crisis.

We are also not likely to see, however, the advantages of a Lehman-style crisis, and these are a relatively quick adjustment in the process of investment misallocation. I have always said that the resolution of the Chinese banking problems is far more likely to resemble that of Japan than the US, and instead of three of four chaotic years as the system adjusts quickly, and at times violently, we are more likely to see a decade or more of a slow grinding-away of the debt excesses. The net economic cost is likely to be higher in a Japanese-style rebalancing, but American-style rebalancing is risky except in countries with very flexible institutions – financial as well as political.

But I do disagree very strongly with Mervyn Davies’ claim that because the PBoC is “very rich in reserves” it will not be much of a challenge to recapitalise the banks. China’s reserves only matter to its credit position if China faced a problem of external debt.

It doesn’t, and so the amount of reserves are almost wholly irrelevant, Because this argument seems to be reviving, it makes sense, I think, to repeat why central bank reserves cannot in any way help China resolve the crisis.

…The idea that reserves can be used to clean up the banks (or anything else, for that matter) is based on a misunderstanding about how the reserves were accumulated in the first place. There seems to be a still-widespread perception that PBoC reserves represent a hoard of unencumbered savings that the PBoC has somehow managed to collect.

But of course they are not. The PBoC has been forced to buy the reserves as a function of its intervention to manage the value of the renminbi. And as they were forced to buy the reserves, the PBoC had to fund the purchases, which it did by borrowing renminbi in the domestic market.

This means that the foreign currency reserves are simply the asset side of a balance sheet against which there are liabilities. What is more, remember that the renminbi has appreciated by more than 30 per cent since July, 2005, so that the value of the assets has dropped in renminbi terms even as the value of the liabilities has remained the same, and this has been exacerbated by the lower interest rate the PBoC currently earns on its assets than the interest rate it pays on much of its liabilities.

In fact there have been rumours for years that the PBoC would be insolvent if its assets and liabilities were correctly marked, but whether or not this is true, any transfer of foreign currency reserves to bail out Chinese banks would simply represent a reduction of PBoC assets with no corresponding reduction in liabilities. The net liabilities of the PBoC, in other words, would rise by exactly the amount of the transfer. Because the liabilities of the PBoC are presumed to be the liabilities of the central government, the net effect of using the reserves to recapitalise the banks is identical to having the central government borrow money to recapitalise the banks.

This is the point. Any government that is able to borrow money can borrow money to recapitalise its banks, whether or not it has large amounts of foreign currency reserves. The amount of central bank reserves that China or any other country has is wholly irrelevant, except perhaps to the extent that without those reserves the central government would lack the credibility to borrow domestically, which hardly seems to be a concern in China’s case.

Bailing out the banks, it turns out, is conceptually no different than transferring debt from the banks to the central government. China can handle bad debts in the banking system, in other words, by transferring the net obligations from the banks to the central government, and the large hoard of reserves held by the PBoC does not make it any easier for China can resolve any future debt problems. In fact if anything it should remind us that when we are trying to calculate the total amount of debt the central government owes, the total should include any net liabilities of the PBoC, and that these net liabilities will increase by 1per cent of GDP every time the renminbi strengthens against the dollar by 2per cent.

Does hidden debt matter?

There is another related fallacy that pops up a surprisingly large number of times when I discuss the net liabilities of the central bank. I am often told that because these liabilities are hidden in the central bank books, and so no one really knows how much debt the PBoC adds to the central government’s debt burden, they really shouldn’t matter in our calculations. The central bank will presumably never default because its obligations are guaranteed by the central government, and the its net liability position is hidden, so why bother even consider the PBoC’s balance sheet when assessing China’s debt position?

Even those who do not understand why this reasoning is incorrect should know that it must obviously be incorrect. If it weren’t, any country could solve all of its debt problems merely by borrowing in a non-transparent way through the central bank. As the Greeks and the Italians most recently showed us, non-transparent borrowing may cause us to recognise a problems later than we otherwise would have, but it cannot solve the problem.

The reason is because in any case debt must either be serviced or the borrower must default. If the assets which were funded by the debt do not create enough wealth with which to service the debt, and if the borrower does not default, then by definition there must have been a transfer from some other entity to cover the difference between the debt servicing cost and the returns on the asset.

Typically this other entity, in China and elsewhere, has been the household sector, and in the case of China the transfer occurred primarily in the hidden form of severely repressed interest rates. Whether the transfer is from the household sector, however, of from other sector, this is where the problem of debt lies for China.

If the central bank (or the commercial banks or any other borrower whose obligations are covered by the central government) is unable to service its debt – and remember that the ‘economic’ debt servicing cost is not the coupon, which is repressed by policymakers, but consists of whatever the ‘natural’ interest rate would have been – the difference will be paid for by someone else, and the economy will suffer slower growth because of the reduction in demand caused by the transfer payment.

So who is likely to cover the cost of NPLs in Chinese banks? This isn’t an easy question to answer. If the household sector continues to pay, either in the hidden form of repressed interest rates, or in the more explicit form of taxes, the existence of bad debt in the Chinese banking system must act to repress future household consumption growth. The transfers from the household sector to pay what may turn out to be a huge NPL bill will significantly lower the household income share of GDP, making it very unlikely that the household consumption share of GDP will rise.

If however the state sector covers the difference (perhaps by privatising state assets and using the proceeds to pay down debt), we are left with the very difficult political problems, which China currently faces, of assigning the costs to different sectors or groups that control the state sector in China. The potentially very large cost of cleaning up NPLs must be assigned to groups that are likely to be both powerful and reluctant to pay the cost.

Debt always matters because it must always be paid for by someone – even if the borrower defaults, of course, the debt is simply ‘paid’ by the lender. This is why the fact that debt in China seems to be growing much faster than debt-servicing capacity implies slower growth in the future. If the debt cannot be fully serviced by the increase in productivity created by the investment that the debt funded, unless it is funded by liquidating state sector assets it must cause a reduction in demand elsewhere, most probably in household consumption. This reduction in demand implies slower growth in the future and, of course, a more difficult rebalancing process.

Michael Pettis is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. He blogs at China Financial Markets, where a longer version of this article first appeared.