钝刀子对付金融机构？
2020-03-25 07:56阅读：
八十年代在央行，我们言必称“金融深化”和麦金农教授。这股风很快传遍了大学经济系。
顺便着这条路，我们走了很远。也许太远。现在，只能用一些金融机构来做祭品。
拙作登在今天的南华早报。
[web_link-https://lnkd.in/fBSgUAE]网页链接
Trade war and the coronavirus will bring China’s quietly raging
consumer debt crisis to a head.
By Joe Zhang,
Online lenders and other more traditional nonbank players are
sinking further into trouble as a weakening Chinese economy takes
its toll.
Given China’s weak legal infrastructure and the government’s
populist bent, expect the fallout to hurt banks and destroy many
nonbank financial institutions。
It is a cliché that Chinese consumers are frugal and that they
maintain a high savings ratio because of a lack of a social safety
net. While that may still be true, it is becoming less so each
year. Indeed, Chinese consumers are facing a real stress test in
the wake of a sluggish economy, a trade war with the US and the
coronavirus pandemic.
As recently as the 1980s, consumer credit was unheard of in China.
But it has
surged to make up 36 per cent of total assets of a banking sector
that has grown over 100-fold. Today, millions of consumers are
choking on debt. But do not hold your breath for an official
announcement of a debt crisis, even though we are clearly deep in
one.
At YX Asset Recovery, we are inundated with requests from lenders
to take on more assignments from them. Our rivals such as Asset 360
and China Data Group are in the same boat.
And a leading online lender, Qudian, which is listed on the New
York Stock Exchange, just reported an 88 per cent sequential drop
in its fourth-quarter earnings after citing rising rates of
delinquency. It looks certain that the lender will plunge into big
losses in the first half of this year.
How did China get here? In hindsight, I think four decades of
high-income growth has fooled consumers into believing that the
high growth is sustainable, even perpetual. Along the way,
household debt has surged to fund consumption, education, homes,
speculation, and businesses that have mostly hit the wall.
Unlike poorer developing countries, China has pushed banking
outlets to its most remote corners. A study by Baoshang Bank shows
that even in sparsely populated Inner Mongolia, there is at least
one bank branch (often a few) in each township.
There is no doubt that China has achieved universal coverage as far
as access to banking is concerned. In fact, it was so overdone a
decade ago that many banks have had to reduce their number of
banking outlets since.
In the meantime, electronic banking has hugely improved universal
coverage. It is no longer true to say that a large segment of the
population is unbanked or underserved.
Having maxed out their credit cards, tens of millions of Chinese
consumers have turned to peer-to-peer lenders and other online
lenders with a vengeance in the past six to seven years. These
lenders were equally zealous. A spark of a good idea quickly turned
to a raging bush fire, thanks to smartphones.
Armed with an infectious slogan of “financial disruption based on
algorithms”, thinly capitalised lending platforms expanded
exponentially between 2012 and 2017. But their quick success became
their own enemy.
Weak compliance and pervasive wrongdoings forced regulators into a
brutal clampdown in 2017, effectively bringing the whole sector to
a sad ending. The unravelling is creating millions of disputes,
lawsuits and unpaid debts.
There has been an intellectual underpinning to China’s journey from
an economic autarky of the 1980s to today’s overflowing financial
excesses. In 1973, Ronald McKinnon, an economics professor at
Stanford University, published his first book, Money and Capital in
Economic Development, and shot to fame in development
economics.
When China started to implement its open-door policies, McKinnon
acquired the status of a spiritual leader in China’s bureaucracy
and economics profession. He and his colleague Edward Shaw had a
simple diagnosis for poor countries: they were suffering under
“financial repression”, such as official controls over interest
rates and external trade on the one hand, and a bloated state
sector receiving a favourable allocation of resources on the
other.
One of the indicators often cited by the professors’ Chinese
disciples was China’s low ratio of money supply to gross domestic
product in those years. The higher credit, the better. Or so they
argued. They have certainly succeeded on that front.
How, then, should China and other poor countries minimise financial
repression? In the interpretation of their Chinese disciples, the
pair offered a simple prescription: implement “financial
deepening”, which means making credit and banking services
available to everyone, including the poorest, while improving
capital mobility.
So, it is little surprise that China’s financial sector reforms
since the 1980s have centred on financial deepening. But, so far,
China has failed to reduce “financial repression”. Today, interest
rates and exchange rates remain controlled. And the state sector is
more dominant than it was 15 years ago, and is consuming ever more
resources.
The only real achievement seems to have been the proliferation of
credit and good access for everyone. Probably too good. Today,
China’s ratio of money supply to GDP has surged to one of the
highest in the world, and the professors’ disciples at the People’s
Bank of China feel too embarrassed to refer to that ratio
again.
How is this consumer debt crisis going to play out? I think what
happened in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and Central
American countries about a decade ago, can provide good hints. In
the case of Andhra Pradesh, the state government enacted punitive
laws to effectively wipe out all microfinance lenders.
And in the case of Central American countries, a mass revolt by
poor borrowers achieved the same goal. Today, China’s weak legal
infrastructure and the government’s populist bent should conspire
to hurt banks and destroy most nonbank financial institutions. Call
it a Proletariat Revenge.
If there is one lesson China should learn from the consumer debt
crisis, it is this: if a family cannot get rich by living beyond
their means, how can a country prosper by endlessly inflating its
credit sector? This happens to be the central theme of Hugh
Sinclair’s 2012 book, Confessions of A Microfinance Heretic.
Joe Zhang is vice-chairman of YX Asset Recovery, the biggest
consumer debt restructuring agency with 13,000 employees, and
author of Inside China’s Shadow Banking: The Next Subprime
Crisis?
