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Last week, Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan penned a letter, published on the bank’s website, discussing problems in China’s financial sector. His letter focused on the private sector, where poor regulatory oversight has encouraged the creation of bubbles in areas such as online lending and real estate. It also discussed the uncertainty over where local government authority ends and central authority begins, citing this as a reason for the difficulty of managing the financial system.
This coincides with recent central government efforts to better control outbound and inbound investment – efforts that have proven hard to enforce. Taken together, this shows that top government officials in China understand, and aren’t afraid to talk about, the problems in the financial system. But there are no simple solutions. Creating new committees and regulations is easy; pre-empting problems and enforcing changes are not.
Of all the Chinese economy’s problems, none are more serious than those in its financial sector, because a failure of the financial system would hurt the entire economy. Firms starved of finances would shut down or slim down, creating unemployment and thus social instability. Instability in a tightly controlled country of 1.4 billion people is potentially catastrophic. To fight this threat, China last week did what it does – it created a new regulatory body, the Financial Stability and Development Commission, to regulate shadow banking, asset management, peer-to-peer Internet finance, and financial holding companies.
This post was published at Mauldin Economics on NOVEMBER 13, 2017.
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