Banco central de china comienza a relajar controles sobre préstamos bancarios

Genevieve Signoret & Patrick Signoret

Hace una semana, el Banco Popular de China eliminó la tasa mínima a la cual los bancos comerciales pueden ofrecer préstamos. No eliminó la tasa de interés máxima que los bancos pueden ofrecer a los ahorradores, evitando lo que muchos analistas consideran es el paso más importante para liberalizar las tasas de interés. Sin embargo, la medida del banco central fue vista como una señal de que las autoridades tienen la firme intención de liberalizar más el mercado de crédito (Reuters vía NYT, FT). Reuters (vía NYT) tiene una cronología de las principales reformas a las tasas de interés y cambios en tasas de política monetaria en China.

Reuters vía NYT:

China’s central bank removed controls on bank lending rates, effective Saturday, in a long-awaited move that signals the new leadership’s determination to carry out market-oriented reforms.

The move gives commercial banks the freedom to compete for borrowers, a reform the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said will help lower financial costs for companies. Previously, the lending floor was 70 percent of the benchmark lending rate.

However, the central bank left a ceiling on deposit rates unchanged at 110 percent of benchmark rates, avoiding for now what many economists see as the most important step Beijing needs to take to free up interest rates.

[…] Some economists were skeptical at how much direct economic impact the move would have because few banks have fully utilized the limited freedom they already had to charge interest rates slightly below benchmark rates, choosing instead to keep their rates slightly above the floor that has been in place.

“So the move may have more of a signaling effect than transmit immediately to the economy but it is an important signaling effect,” said Manik Narain, emerging market strategist at UBS in London.

[…] The PBOC made clear in its statement on Friday that it does not intend to ease up on its controls over mortgage rates. Beijing has been clamping down on the property sector for several years to try to keep a lid on rising prices and speculative buying.

It said it planned to free up deposit rates eventually but now was not the right time. It said it still needed to do more groundwork, which is expected to include launching a deposit insurance system – something many observers expect may happen sometime this year.

[…] Longer-term, the latest move could signal that the government will step up other reforms seen as necessary to help rebalance the economy.

“This underlines that China is moving to a fully convertible currency and floating exchange rates,” said Flemming Nielsen, senior analyst at Danske Bank in Copenhagen. “Their next step will be to widen the daily trading band for RMB (yuan). They should do that within the next three months.”

FT:

On Friday, the People’s Bank of China said it was scrapping a decades-old floor on the discount that Chinese banks can offer for commercial interest rates – the biggest change to the country’s interest rate regime since caps on lending rates were removed in 2004.

But the highly symbolic move marked something of a bureaucratic defeat for the central bank, which had hoped to liberalise the ceiling on bank deposit rates at the same time, according to people familiar with the matter.

In a statement, the PBOC said the main reason for not removing caps on interest rates for deposits was because the implications of that reform were much greater and the risks of implementing it much higher.

“We must proceed [with this reform] in an orderly manner once all the necessary preconditions are in place,” the bank said.

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