«Los pesimistas están comenzando a preocuparse (correctamente) por los niveles excesivos de deuda, y algunos están prediciendo un colapso financiero (lo que considero mucho menos probable). En cambio, los optimistas creen que los préstamos fallidos no suponen un problema para el crecimiento porque en el último episodio hace una década no lo supuso. Los optimistas se equivocan porque obvian el coste de la recapitalización. China pagó un precio muy alto por su crisis bancaria: un menor crecimiento del consumo al pasar la factura a las familias»
Comentarios
¿el pueblo chino?
#2, bingo:
Total banking deposits in China are around RMB 64 trillion. Around 60% of the total represent household deposits (an estimate, since there is some ambiguity in the numbers). Total GDP is nearly RMB 34 trillion. Inputting all of that into my trusty Excel Spreadsheet suggests that at a minimum, households have “paid” in form of excessively low rates on their deposits a minimum of 5% of GDP every year, and possibly up to two times that amount, during the past decade.
This is, to me, an astonishing number. Every year households may have transferred at least 5% of GDP to the banks, and possibly a lot more. Now of course they are paying for a many other things than simply recapitalizing the banks. They are also paying to keep the cost of capital low so as to make viable a whole series of investments – manufacturing investments, real estate investments, infrastructure investments, PBoC sterilization bills, other government bonds, etc – that might be considered non-economic investments and that would otherwise show negative returns (in fact excessively low interest rates, as the various recent US bubbles clearly indicate, almost always lead to misallocated investment). But since a lot of this investment occurs through the banking system anyway (for example banks directly or indirectly buy most sterilization bills), much of this ends up as part of the bank clean-up.
Destaco dos secciones: la primera es el párrafo que viene a continuación de la entradilla:
When US leverage was rising and the world growing quickly, the cost of that collapse in consumption was easily masked by China’s surging trade surplus, but it was real nonetheless. The bank recapitalization resulted in a brutal exacerbation of China’s already unbalanced growth model, and made it all the more vital for consumption in China to surge, especially as the world’s appetite for Chinese trade surpluses is dwindling rapidly. As happened in Japan after 1990, when households were forced to clean up their own massively insolvent banks, the consequence could be a slowdown in consumption growth just as the country is being forced to rebalance its economy towards consumption.