海外之声 | 我们是否处在中国信贷紧缩的边缘？（中英双语）

观点速递

本文作者是卡托研究所货币与金融替代中心（the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives）的政策分析师迪亚哥·苏洛阿加。本文首次刊登于CapX。

作者围绕中国近年来的信贷规模问题进行了讨论，同时谈及了不良贷款的影响，中国经济增速放缓将使不良贷款的重负更加难以承受。若中国发生信贷紧缩，欧美国家也许也会受到波及。

中文译文如下：

我们是否处在中国信贷紧缩的边缘

迪亚哥·苏洛阿加

翻译：刘雨晴

审校：熊若洁

2018年7月11日

假如中国是欧元区国家，中国可能会被视为下一个“债券义和团”受害者。

尽管中华人民共和国在过去十年间GDP增速超过6.5%，但是私有信贷对GDP比例增加了不止一倍。实际上自金融危机以来，在私有信贷行业的全球增量中，中国足足占了三分之一。

只有爱尔兰和西班牙，在两国不幸的房地产繁荣高峰期，其增长速度和规模才能够媲美中国的信贷行业的增长。

如果中国信贷市场自由透明，那么投资者可能会放心——但中国的信贷市场明显并非如此。随着市场改革的进展，20世纪80年代从中国人民银行剥离出来的“四大”国有银行控制了贷款。现在国有四大行仍占有银行资产的四分之一，其中大部分贷给国有工业企业，这些贷款通常是根据政治标准发放，而非商业标准。

零售行业的情况也不容乐观。截至2015年10月，银行存款利率受到限制。类似的金融控制手段不仅以牺牲储户利益增加了银行利润，而且助长了储户通过“购买房屋”、投机大型国有企业非流动性股票和购买快速增长的影子银行推出的投资产品等方式获取收益，而以上三个市场都出现了过热的迹象。

假如中国是欧元区国家，中国可能会被视为下一个“债券义和团”受害者。

但并非所有都是坏消息。随着97年亚洲金融危机而来的不良贷款占总贷款的25%之多，但通过公私资本重组以及以优惠条款收购不良资产，该比例已经降至可控范围之内。但尽管如此，中国的纳税人也不得不为国家亲信的错误决策买单。

但是到目前为止，让中国免于金融危机的并非共产党领导人的英明领导，而是从上世纪90年代到2008年以来中国惊人的平均经济增长率。当一个经济体以每年10%的速度增长时，即使不良贷款的绝对值以每年3%的速度增长，不良贷款的影响仍然能够在十年之内减半。

但是在2008年以后，很多事情都改变了。首先，中国的经济增长率似乎永久性放缓。自2015年，官方公布的经济增长率在6.5%左右徘徊，这比金融危机前的水平低了三分之一。

持怀疑态度的人认为，经济增长数据仍可能被高估了，他们认为，地方政府的统计员有动机夸大经济产出数据，国有企业的生产活动仅有部分是与市场相关的，这种优势令中国相比于西方国家更难衡量附加价值。李总理当时就不信任官方GDP数据，并建议分析师使用其他数据统计办法，比如统计货运量和发电量。

经济增速放缓使不良贷款的重负更加难以承受。如果再增加20万亿美元私人借贷的话，就像2008年以来的中国那样，那么通过经济增长消除不良贷款负面影响的可能性就更渺茫了。

“鬼城”中无人居住的公寓，还有因为美国提高关税而生产放缓的工厂都证明，也许这一次情况真的跟以往不同了。

但我们仍有理由保留希望。2015年利率放开让金融管制成为过去；地方政府为刺激中国经济在2009年大幅放开预算，但因为银行迫于中央政府压力收紧借贷条款，又不得不锁紧预算。

外资能够直接持有中国的银行和保险公司股票，且中国大陆与外国股市联系也更加紧密，这都提高了外资在中国金融领域的参与程度，这很可能改善中国的公司治理状况。

由于以上这些原因，信贷将很难流向难以盈利的企业，因为资产泡沫会因为利率管制而加剧，还因为上市公司会为内部人士而不是股东的利益运转。

而这些措施是否因来得太迟，以致于无法把中国从大量不良贷款中解救出来呢？这又是一个完全不同的问题了。无论是短期因素，如日渐上升的贸易紧张局势，还是长期因素——共产党灾难性的独生子女政策（幸好现已取消）导致未来人口快速老龄化，都会将解决中国日益增多的债务的问题复杂化。

中国是一个中等收入国家，可中国的人均GDP仅为美国的1/7，还有着堪比富裕国家的债务水平和人口老龄化趋势。中国的东部省份和西部地区存在着巨大的收入差距，较为富裕的东部省份率先开放并持续迅速地开放，而西部地区在市场改革方面较为滞后。中国将很快面临一些此前只有更加成熟的经济体曾面临过的问题。

对于中国面临的问题，欧洲和美国不应沾沾自喜，更不应幸灾乐祸。中华人民共和国现在是是世界最大的经济体，从最新数据看来，其经济总量占世界的18.7%。即使中国与西方国家相比，它与世界其他国家的联系没那么紧密，但如若中国发生信贷紧缩，也会波及很远——我们谁都难以独善其身。

英文原文如下：

Are We on the Verge of a Chinese Credit Crunch?

Diego Zuluaga

  11 July 2018

If China were a Eurozone country, it would likely be regarded as the next victim of the bond vigilantes.

The People’s Republic has more than doubled its stock of private credit relative to GDP in the last ten years, even as output grew at annual rates exceeding 6.5 per cent. Indeed, China accounts for fully one-third of the global increase in private debt since the financial crisis.

Only Ireland and Spain, at the height of their ill-fated housing booms, can rival the Chinese credit explosion in rapidity and scale.

Investors might be reassured if Chinese credit markets were free and transparent. But that is manifestly not the case. Lending is dominated by the “Big Four” state-owned banks that were spun off from the People’s Bank of China in the 1980s, as market reforms got under way. They still account for 60 per cent of bank assets, most of which are loans to state-owned industrial enterprises, often extended according to political rather than business criteria.

The retail side doesn’t look much better. Until October of 2015, bank deposit interest rates were capped. Such financial repression not only fattened bank profits at the expense of their depositors, but it also encouraged Chinese savers to reach for yield by buying houses, speculating in illiquid stocks of largely state-owned companies, and acquiring investment products in the country’s burgeoning shadow banking sector. All three markets have of late shown signs of overheating.

If China were a Eurozone country, it would likely be regarded as the next victim of the bond vigilantes.

Not all is bad news. Non-performing loans, which in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis represented an eye-popping 25 per cent of total loans, have been brought down to manageable levels through a mixture of public and private recapitalisation, and the purchase on favourable terms of toxic assets. But even here, Chinese taxpayers have had to pick up the tab for the bad decisions of state cronies.

And it hasn’t been the astute management of Communist Party chiefs that has helped the country avoid a financial crash so far, but the breathtaking growth rates that China averaged between the early 1990s and 2008. When an economy is growing at 10 per cent per year, the weight of bad loans can halve in ten years, even with the absolute value of bad loans growing annually at 3 per cent.

But a number of things have changed since 2008. Firstly, Chinese growth seems to have permanently slowed. Official growth rates have hovered around 6.5 per cent since 2015, one-third below the pre-crisis norm.

Even that may be an overestimate according to sceptics, who argue that local government statisticians have incentives to inflate output figures, and that the preponderance of state-owned enterprises whose production is only partly market-based makes assessing true value-added more difficult than it is in the West. Li Keqiang, a former Premier, himself distrusted official GDP statistics and advised analysts to use alternative measures, such as freight volumes and electricity generation.

A slower growth rate makes a given burden of bad loans harder to shoulder. If it is accompanied by a $20 trillion increase in the stock of private debt, as has happened in China since 2008, the chances to outgrow any large bad bets become even slimmer. Anecdotal evidence of empty apartment blocks in ghost cities, and of a factory slowdown as US tariffs start to bite, supports the case that this time may indeed be different from the past.

Yet there are reasons to be hopeful. The October 2015 interest-rate liberalisation made financial repression a thing of the past. Local governments, whose budget constraints were dramatically loosened in 2009 in a bid to stimulate the Chinese economy, have had to retrench as banks made lending terms stricter under pressure from the central government.

Increased foreign participation in China’s financial sector, through direct stakes in banks and insurers, and greater links between mainland and foreign stock markets, will hopefully improve the corporate governance of firms.

All of them combined will make it less likely for credit to continue to flow to unprofitable firms, for asset bubbles to be stoked by interest-rate meddling, and for listed companies to be run for the benefit of insiders rather than that of shareholders.

Whether these measures came too late to save China from an extensive writedown of bad debts is an altogether different question. Both short-term factors, in the form of rising trade tensions, and the long-term prospect of rapid population ageing as a result of the Communist Party cataclysmic one-child policy (now thankfully defunct), will complicate dealing with the country’s mounting debt pile.

China is a middle-income country — its GDP per capita still just one-seventh that of the United States — with rich-country indebtedness and demographic trends. There are large income differences between the richer eastern provinces, which liberalised first and have continued to do so rapidly, and the western regions which have lagged on market reform. But the point remains that China will soon grapple with problems that historically have confronted only more mature economies.

Nor should Europe and America be complacent, let alone gleeful, about Chinese difficulties. The People’s Republic is now the world’s largest economy, accounting for 18.7 per cent of global output at last count. Even if its links to the rest of the world are more tenuous than those of Western countries, a Chinese credit crunch will be felt further afield — and we will all suffer for it.

内容整理 罗梦宇

图文编辑 罗梦宇

审校  田雯

监制  朱霜霜

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