Caixin Media

07.01.14

China Pulling the Plug on Foreign Mainframes

E-commerce companies and banks in China are scrapping hardware and uninstalling software for mainframe servers made by American suppliers in favor of homegrown brands said to be safe, advanced, and a lot less expensive.The movement has taken special...

China Now Has More Millionaires Than Any Country but the U.S.

Jason Chow
Wall Street Journal
China had 2,378,000 millionaire households in 2013, a rise of 82% from the previous year and almost double the 1,240,000 millionaire households in Japan, according to the Boston Consulting Group Global Wealth 2014 report unveiled on Tuesday.

China’s New Diplomatic Strategy in Africa: Humility

Eric Olander & Cobus van Staden
Just a few weeks after Chinese premier Li Keqiang admitted that China was going through “growing pains” in its engagement with Africa, Beijing’s central bank chief, Zhou Xiaochuan, acknowledged some of the 2,500 PRC companies operating in Africa are...

Ex JPMorgan China banker questioned in HK

Jamil Anderlini
Financial Times
Hong Kong authorities have interviewed Fang Fang, JPMorgan Chase’s former head of investment banking in China, as they investigate government bribery allegations.

Media

05.13.14

Why Are There No Credit Scores in China?

Few would dispute that Chinese society suffers from a serious trust problem. After surviving crafty scams and shoddy products for years, Chinese people have become guarded with strangers and cautious in business dealings. Given all that, it would be...

Wall Street Girds for China Bribery Probe as IPOs Beckon

Cathy Chan And Keri Geiger
Bloomberg
Wall Street hiring in Asia is under increasing scrutiny after a U.S. criminal investigation into whether JPMorgan Chase & Co. employed children of China’s elite in violation of anti-bribery laws.

Is China really running out of cash?

Leslie Shaffer
CNBC
Citibank fund transfer delays sparks concern over a possible nation-wide liquidity shortage. 

China Approves Pilot Plan to Set Up 3-5 Private Banks

Nick Macfie
Reuters
In a step to boost financial support for cash-starved smaller firms, The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) has announced its plan to maintain “prudential regulatory standards” in approving private banks. 

China Pressures Media to Tone Down Cash Crunch Story

Jamil Anderlini and Simon Rabinovitch
Financial Times
Chinese propaganda officials have ordered financial journalists and some media outlets to tone down their coverage of a liquidity crunch in the interbank market, in a sign of how worried Beijing is that the turmoil will continue when markets reopen.

Caixin Media

08.27.13

Inner Mongolia: Where Bankers Sold Bunk

Underlying the trial of a woman authorities say drained bank accounts and kidnapped a banker’s wife are vexing questions about account security and teller supervision at China’s state-run bank branches in Inner Mongolia.Hundreds of millions of yuan...

Caixin Media

07.22.13

Liberal Urge Gaining Support for Bank Policy

The orchestra is tuning up for an interest rate liberalization initiative that financial analysts are calling music to their ears.Recent high-level comments and policy statements heard in Beijing have clearly sounded a central government call for...

Caixin Media

07.08.13

Central Bank Raises the Red Flag over P2P Lending Risks

A recent report by the central bank about peer-to-peer (P2P) lending websites in China has shed light on some severe problems in the business for which there is, as yet, little regulation.The original idea for P2P lending websites was that they were...

Inside China’s Bank-Rate Missteps

Lingling Wei and Bob Davis
Wall Street Journal
A rare peek into the actions of China’s leaders in a month when a Chinese cash crunch spooked global investors shows a leadership falling short in its struggle to redirect China's economy and also faltering in its efforts to convey its...

Caixin Media

06.25.13

Legal, Economic Reforms Important At Coming Party Session

China’s blueprint for economic reform is finally taking shape. The government has appointed a taskforce to draft the plans, ahead of the third plenary meeting of the 18th Central Committee. With the country’s economy at the crossroads, these plans...

Caixin Media

04.22.13

Heading off a China-style Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Warning of local governments’ high exposure to bad debts, the credit agency Fitch recently downgraded China’s long-term local-currency rating from AA– to A+. Officials should take note: the downgrade underlines how closely international markets are...

Caixin Media

04.01.13

New Hands Take the Financial Regulation Wheel

Who’s steering China’s carefully managed financial system? Speculators were busy name-guessing before and for several months after the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in November.Finally, the dust started to settle with formal appointments...

Reports

03.27.13

How Effective are Macroprudential Policies in China?

Bin Wang, Tao Sun
Luo Xiaoyuan
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
This paper investigates macroprudential policies and their role in containing systemic risk in China. It shows that China faces systemic risk in both the time (procyclicality) and cross-sectional (contagion) dimensions. The former is reflected as...

China's Central Bank, Aircraft Carrier Style

Dinny McMahon and Carlos Tejada
Wall Street Journal
The People’s Bank of China will issue gold and silver coins celebrating the nation's first aircraft carrier. 

Caixin Media

12.07.12

Who Pays When a Wealth Product Fails?

A crowd of angry investors packed a Shanghai branch of Huaxia Bank on December 3 after they heard that the money wasn’t there for the first of four repayments for a 119 million-yuan wealth management plan. They demanded their money back from Huaxia...

From Bubble to Muddling Through

Bill Bishop
Deal Book
Two measures of manufacturing activity, the official Purchasing Managers Index and the HSBC Purchasing Managers Index, both rose above 50, which indicates expansion, for the first time in months. All is not rosy though, as this roundup of...

Caixin Media

11.12.12

Weighing Risks Amid a Wealth Management Boom

Is China’s wealth management business a booming profit volcano for investors, or just another smoke-and-mirrors pyramid scheme?It’s a question dividing the nation’s bankers and banking regulators as investors of all kinds pour cash into bank-...

Books

10.18.12

China and the Credit Crisis

Giles Chance
China’s arrival on the world scene in the 1990s was the largest part of globalization. It brought many benefits worldwide: lower prices to Western consumers, large profits to multinationals, huge windfalls to commodity-rich countries, and employment and strong export growth to China. China’s emergence as a major global supplier and trader helped to create a boom which brought global growth with lower inflation and, for a time, an illusory stability, and also made China into the largest financer of the developed world.But Western politicians, regulators and bankers, their vision limited by national boundaries, did not understand at the time the true causes of the global economic boom of the Millennium. They attributed it largely to a revolution in risk management and their own wise policies. China and the Credit Crisis argues that if the role played in the new prosperity by globalization and an emerging China had been better understood, more appropriate policies and actions may have been adopted by central bankers and regulators which could have avoided the financial crash in 2008, or at least greatly limited its impact.China and the Credit Crisis goes on to examine the larger role that China will continue to play in a post-crisis world.

Caixin Media

08.25.12

Revamping the Landscape of Forex Flow

Capital flows out of China may be accelerating, a phenomenon commonly associated with waning confidence in a nation’s economy. But the foreign exchange regulator says the change is a step in the right direction.In the first six months of the year,...

Caixin Media

06.29.12

Barclay’s Diamond Offers an Optimistic Vision

A calm, confident Robert Diamond discussed financial restructuring in Europe and economic options for the Chinese government during a June 14 interview—thirteen days before the British bank where he serves as CEO, Barclays Group, was fined for...

Environment

05.14.12

Keeping an Eye on China’s Bankers

from chinadialogue
Last August, a major pollution story broke in China: 5,000 tonnes of toxic chromium tailings had been dumped near a Yunnan reservoir, contaminating water supplies and killing livestock. Worse revelations were to come. The company behind the incident...

Caixin Media

04.19.12

Strategic Reserves

(Beijing)—In an odd twist for China’s powerful banks, the biggest state-owned lenders last year started running low on the foreign currency needed for loans to enterprises investing overseas.“Some commercial banks suspended U.S. dollar loans” after...

Caixin Media

04.09.12

Dalian Businessman Who Built an Empire Vanishes

(Dalian)—The sudden disappearance of a self-made billionaire in the coastal city of Dalian has unnerved not only bank executives concerned about loans they made to his companies, but also government officials who have lent generous support to the...

Reports

02.20.12

China’s Banking System: Issues for Congress

Michael F. Martin
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
China’s banking system has been gradually transformed from a centralized, government-owned, and government-controlled provider of loans into an increasingly competitive market in which different types of banks, including several U.S. banks, strive...

Sinica Podcast

09.24.10

Attack of the China Bears

Kaiser Kuo, Gady Epstein & more from Sinica Podcast
As the American economy teeters on the brink of a double-dip recession, “China Bear” sightings have increased significantly. A loosely-knit group of economists and critics who see storm clouds looming over the Chinese economy, China Bears have a...

Reports

09.01.09

What Drives China's Interbank Market?

Nathan Porter and TengTeng Xu
Sara Segal-Williams
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Interest rates in China comprise a mix of both market determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (lending and deposit rates), reflecting China's gradual process of interest rate liberalization. We...

Reports

01.01.07

China: Strengthening Monetary Policy Implementation

Bernard J. Laurens and Rodolfo Maino
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The People's Bank of China (PBC) has made great strides in modernizing its monetary policy frameworks, but their effectiveness will diminish as the sophistication of the economy increases. Empirical evidence supports maintaining a reference to...

Reports

12.01.06

The Rise of Foreign Investments in Chinese Banks—Taking Stock

Lamin Leigh and Richard Podpiera
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The recent wave of foreign investment in China's banks and the prospects of further opening of the banking sector under the WTO agreement suggest that foreign banks are likely to play an increasingly important role in China. This paper takes...

Reports

11.01.06

Can Good Events Lead to Bad Outcomes? Endogenous Banking Crises and Fiscal Policy Responses

Andrew Feltenstein and Céline Rochon
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
A study of the impact of labor market restructuring and foreign direct investment on the banking sector, using a dynamic general equilibrium model with a financial sector. Numerical simulations are performed using stylized Chinese data, and bank...

Reports

05.01.06

Do Financing Biases Matter for the Chinese Economy?

Yasheng Huang
Cato Institute
It is widely acknowledged that China’s financial system is deeply troubled. Its banks have very high nonperforming loan ratios and its stock market has lost 50 percent of its value since 2001 amidst a GDP growth rate averaging some 9 percent a year...

Reports

05.01.06

A Framework for Independent Monetary Policy in China

Marvin Goodfriend and Eswar Prasad
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
As China's economy becomes more market-based and continues its rapid integration into the global economy, having an independent and effective monetary policy regime oriented to domestic objectives will become increasingly important...

Reports

03.01.06

Progress in China's Banking Sector Reform: Has China's Bank Behavior Changed?

Richard Podpiera
Sara Segal-Williams
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Substantial effort has been devoted to reforming China's banking system in recent years. The authorities recapitalized three large state-owned banks, introduced new governance structures, and brought in foreign strategic investors. However, it...