China Defaulting Loans Soar

Just to follow up on yesterday's post about China's likely crash, here are some quotes from an interesting Bloomberg report (I had saved it a while ago, but took several days to write my previous post so the report is already more than 10 days old...):

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Non-performing loans in China have risen into the “trillions of renminbi” because of poor lending practices, an insolvency lawyer said.

“We work really closely with SASAC, the state-owned enterprise regulator in China, and there are literally trillions and trillions of renminbi of, frankly, defaulting loans already in China that no one is doing anything about,” Neil McDonald, a Hong Kong-based business restructuring and insolvency partner with Lovells LLP, said at an Asia-Pacific Loan Market Association conference yesterday. “At some point there’s going to be a reckoning for that.” [...]

Chinese banks issued a record 9.6 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) of new loans last year as part of a 4 trillion yuan stimulus package aimed at bolstering growth through the global financial crisis.

“At some point in China, maybe it will be two, three or five years, but at some point there will be in the property markets and in the markets generally, there will be rationalization of very poor lending practices,” McDonald said during the panel discussion on restructuring and refinancing at the Global Loan Market Summit in Hong Kong.

Over the past decade China’s government has spent more than $650 billion bailing out state banks after years of government- directed lending caused bad loans to balloon. The average non- performing loan ratio at Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp. and Bank of China Ltd. dropped to about 1.6 percent as of Sept. 30 from more than 20 percent before each bank was bailed out, according to earnings reports.