As I’ve been warning on this blog for some time, the explosion of credit in China has created a great deal of paper-bottomed optimism over the recovery.
Fitch, the ratings agency, has just raised its macro-prudential risk indicator ffor China from category 1 (safe) to category 3 (Iceland et al) because of the lending surge and public debt.
China’s Banking Regulatory Commission warned last week: “The top priority at the moment is to stop explosive lending. Banks should carefully monitor the process of credit approval and allocation, and make sure that loans flow into the real economy.”
And Andy Xie, the often-quoted Sino-bear, says in the same article I’ve linked to above from The Daily Telegraph: “Commodity speculators have been using cheap credit to play the arbitrage spread between futures and spot on the oil markets. They have even found ways to trade lumber to iron ore by sheer scale of leverage. “They’ve made everything open to speculation.”
This is probably one of the main factors behind the boom in speculation in linear-low density polyethylene (LLDPE) futures on the Dalian Commodity Exchange. PVC futures were also recently launched on the exchange.
As my fellow blogger Paul Hodges points out on his blog, Chemicals & The Economy, China is at risk of repeating the mistakes of the West: an unsustainable rise in credit.
The obvious danger, as has been flagged up before, is a sudden collapse in chemicals demand and pricing as inventories are unwound (built up with too-easy) as tougher lending conditions are imposed. This could be an even more dramatic bursting of the current equities and commodity price bubbles if it occurs at the same time as sharp fall in crude (which seems likely if equities are hammered.