Tal vez Banco Popular Chino quiso señalar intenciones: abrirá llave de crédito

Genevieve Signoret

En una reciente entrada de blog, Michael Pettis explica que el recorte en el encaje legal por el Banco Popular Chino (BPCh) impacta poco o nada con flujos de crédito pero puede servir de señal de intenciones de frenar el flujo de crédito en meses venideros. Salen divisas, se desacelera la inflación, se desacelera también (y bruscamente) su actividad económica y las autoridades miran con alarma los eventos en la zona del euro. Aquí está Pettis:

Two weeks ago on Wednesday night, after the Chinese markets closed, the People’s Bank of China announced that it had cut the minimum reserve requirement by 50 basis points to 21% for the large banks, and lower for the smaller banks.  With the announcement coming just hours before announcements by the Fed, the ECB and the central banks of the UK, Switzerland, Japan and Canada, that they would jointly lower interest rates on dollar liquidity swaps to make it cheaper for banks around the world to trade in dollars, it seemed like world’s major central banks were determined to stimulate global credit growth.

But the PBoC move is qualitatively different from that of the others.  I think it is important to remember that changes in the minimum reserve requirements in China have more to do with managing the changes in underlying liquidity caused by net inflows and outflows to China than they have to do with changes in credit.

Según Pettis, normalmente, el principal propósito del encaje es esterilizar las compras de divisas: impedir que la liquidez en yuan añadido a la economía por la compra de dólares (por ejemplo) para mantener artificialmente subvaluado al yuan frente a sus socios comerciales se traduzca en creación de dinero, generando así inflación.

But the change in the reserve requirement usually has very little to do with credit growth, except possibly as a way for Beijing to signal its intentions.  For the past several years the main role of the reserve requirement hikes has been to soak up liquidity created by the monetization of the increases in the PBoC reserves (and, I suspect, to lower the funding cost for the PBoC, which would otherwise almost certainly run a negative carry).  When Beijing wants to affect credit expansion it does so mainly by administratively tightening or relaxing constraints on credit growth.

Sin embargo, no están entrando divisas en este momento: al contrario, están saliendo. Mayor razón por pensar que puede abrirse ahora la llave del crédito, relajando restricciones crediticias:

Since central bank reserves have not risen in recent months – in large part, it seems, because net speculative inflows have reversed (almost certainly because expectations of a stronger RMB have receded) – the PBoC may have decided that it needed to provide liquidity to the interbank market.  I suspect that this cut indicates that there were continued net outflows in November, perhaps even substantial. We’ll know soon enough.

In fact the RMB continues to trade sharply down during intraday trading, only to be nudged up overnight by the PBoC fixing.  Three weeks ago in my newsletter I wrote extensively about this process and how it is probably a very good indicator of sentiment about RMB appreciation prospects.  From the data it seems that speculative capital is leaving China.

The combination of net outflows of flight capital and the sharp reduction in year-on-year inflation in October has left the PBoC feeling that they can afford to relax on the monetary side – even though, as I have long argued, inflation was bound to decline, but not because of traditional monetary tightening.

Growth is slowing

The more interesting question for most of us I think is whether in response to slowing growth Beijing will relax credit constraints in the near term.  Everyone who follows China closely knows about problems in the real estate sector, whose importance to growth in China should not be underestimated, but the growth weakness was across the board.  An article in last week’s Caixin lists the bad PMI numbers for October.

No lo dice, pero probablemente las restricciones crediticias a las que se refiere el autor son administrativas: instrucciones que se dan a los bancos estatales. Le pedí los detalles en un comentario a su blog (en revisión por su moderador).