A massive China sinkhole

Several major news outlets have reported on the problem of sinkholes in China.

Similar to the formations in the US and Central America, sinkholes often appear as a result of human activities - mining and construction or extraction of water for agriculture which alter the composition of below ground rock and soil which can then collapse.  As CNN reports these appearances can not only result in the occasional damage to pavements and roadways, but to vast swathes of often agricultural land in some areas which can end up sinking below the water level.  Relocations of infrastrucure and people can follow in what is a disturbing development for some localities such as Jining in Shandong Province.

Infrastructure revealed in China (c) AFP

Also disturbing and seemingly potentially catastrophic are emerging insights into the scale of capital shortfalls in China's banking system and economy. With the inner vaults of banks hollowed out by excessive lending, diversionary schemes and sources of risk concealed from regulators it is becoming a certainty that significant writedowns of bank assets will have to be made at some point.

It is with this in mind then that reports are emerging of steps being taken to put into operation the clean up of banking balance sheets by special "bad bank" vehicles - namely "asset management companies" (AMCs) which were set up in the late nineties to absorb bad loan portfolios from the largest Chinese "Big Four" banks - ICBC, BOC, Ag Bank and CCB (which became Cinda, Huarong, Orient and Great Wall, each taking on the bad loan portfolios of one bank).  

Fraser and Howie in their book Red Capitalism walk through the tainted origins of the AMC's which bought the bad loans at full face value and failed to achieve much running off of the portfolios (often recovering as little as 20 cents in the dollar, barely covering their costs and instead rolling over the bad loans).  Since then, apart from what the FT has investigated as seeming repayments from the central government and the AMCs taking on new debts and branching into active financing business, there has been nothing to quell serious doubts about whether the AMCs are fit for purpose (a historical perspective on the recovery process is here).   

While analysts debate the room for manoeuvre for AMCs, the scope of the task is substantial:

...In 1998, when these AMCs were formed, the first Rmb1.4tn batch of bad loans were bought at face value, or 100 cents on the dollar, which was great for the big four banks, but less good for the bad banks. They recovered only about 20 cents on the dollar. 

However, in the late 1990s, that Rmb1.4tn accounted for about 15 per cent of bank loans, according to CLSA. Ms Chu calculates that the Chinese banking system’s assets grew by $14tn between 2008 and 2013 – equivalent to adding the entire US banking system to its banks’ balance sheets. 

This illustrates why China needs more than merely a government bailout to tackle bad loans this time and that it will probably take a lot more than four privatised AMCs.

And with the application by Cinda to launch an IPO in Hong Kong, some are starting to question the viability of any such venture (given one as author contended, they have become "toxic waste dumps" of bad loan portfolios) :

...today China's four big asset management companies look on the surface like respectable universal financial services groups, with solid balance sheets and handsome earnings. In February, Cinda announced profits for last year of 14 billion yuan (HK$17.6 billion), while Huarong made 12 billion yuan. 

Sceptics claim these profits are illusory, produced by the companies trading assets among themselves at artificially inflated values....For potential investors, however, earnings quality should be only a minor concern compared with the enduring doubts that surround the strength of the asset management companies' balance sheets. 

Offsetting the liability of their bonds, their assets now consist largely of what amount to IOUs from the Ministry of Finance. These are not sovereign bonds, but merely a vague promise to pay at some point in the future....If these IOUs are comparable to similar IOUs held by state banks, then their eventual repayment is to be funded by recoveries from the bad assets injected into the "co-managed accounts". 

In short, it appears the recent restructuring of the asset management companies was nothing more than a cosmetic exercise, which still left them exposed to their original portfolios of worthless loans.  If so, their liabilities far outweigh the true value of their assets; they are insolvent. 

 And what could be the likely scale of losses in the banking sector? Goldman Sachs has come up with an estimate of $3 trillion (which presumably doesn't factor in any downward adjustment to rates of growth stemming from the fact that official Chinese GDP may be overstated by $1 trillion), which is about the size of China's coveted foreign reserves (which by the way may not be of any use in a domestic currency crisis, being held offshore and in another currency). And this may be the nail in the coffin - the backstop of every China watcher - the ability of the state to bail out any distressed entity may simply not be sufficient enough - as stated by Charlene Chu:

There is tremendous confidence in the ability and the willingness of the Chinese Communist party to bail everyone out....But as the system gets bigger and bigger, there are more questions about how feasible that is.”

Rather a large hole to fill.

The fog of war

So much has happened in recent days (often behind the scenes, or at least in reporting columns) that it seems like a past era when only last Wednesday the Federal Reserve roiled world credit, equity, currency and commodity markets by announcing plans to exit (or slow down or taper) from its almost half decade QE money printing program.  Pandemonium followed across emerging markets but for the first time ever the Chinese central bank, the People's Bank of China, and its liquidity operations (or to be precise, it's lack of liquidity operations for two crucial days) stole or at least shared the limelight with the Fed.

The PBOC has been in the background supporting interbank lending and repo markets in China for some years, particularly as it does not conduct market operations around the interest rate itself (which unlike many large economies is fixed).  Instead it smooths out fluctuations in the amount of money circulating between banks by transacting in its own instruments (or that was my recollection last time I checked!) - the point being that for some time now the PBOC has stepped in and provided liquidity to the market, typically around holidays and at key points during the calendar including tax payment time.

Where it gets interesting is trying to understand what actually happened and what it means.  Some themes from this:

1) Foreigners still don't understand China.  Two examples - Ford and banks Citibank and HSBC have both announced new product offering and initiatives in recent days.  Details on this in a moment, but first to confirm a bit of terminology/details:

- wealth management products (wmps - or weapons of mass ponzi) are unregulated high risk high interest fund-style products which have become popular in China due to low official interest rates.  They are unregulated, risky and believed by many to be responsible for the massive risk exposures which will bring China's undoing. Often the underlying assets can be junk like cashflows from empty pawn shops or unbuilt buildings.

- one of the likely motivations of the cancelling of liquidity was to choke wealth management products by stopping their issuers (bank group companies) getting further credit via the banks (from the PBOC).  As a matter of fact this will never work due to the channels by which money flows through the Chinese economy, but nevertheless has been flagged and could work in theory.

So what was announced?  Ford commented that Alan Mulally is working "overtime" to rollout credit services to customers in China and the above banks announced they had permission to sell local mutual fund products.

Do you see a problem here? In a land awash with credit Ford wants to introduce more! And not just any credit - every type of credit imaginable - it was reported on several occasions last year that domestic construction equipment manufacturer Zoomlion saw many of its clients purchase concrete mixers purely for the purpose using them as collateral to take out loans.  And with HSBC and Citibank what sane manager would want to dive into an overexposed product class which has been called toxic and a threat to the Chinese financial system?!

China is a ponzi economy alright - feted insider Jim Rickards has joined the naysayers and interviewed on it this week (see here).  But if foreigners struggle to read China in a static period what hope do they have in a crisis?

There were plenty of views as to what was going on, and many focussed on the role of the PBOC.

2) the PBOC lost credibility and control - By having to change its position, precipitated by an intervening crisis, the PBOC has conceded its ability to set the policy and ended up subsidising the banking sector - back to business as usual (and in particular continuing with backstopping to the state sector).  Much of the commentary focussed on the intentions of the PBOC.

Did they intentionally pop a bubble and will it nevertheless blow anyway?  Were the regulators drawing a line in the sand against the financiers?  Were they trying to choke off only the wmp and shadow banking sector? Were they sending a warning to the new Chinese government to slow reforms and financial liberalisation (which they would argue will cause more chaos - as it happens the PBOC has always been a reactionist faction countering the modernisers at the National Development and Reform Commission)? Were they doing the bidding of the Communist Party which wants to put its stamp on things? Was the PBOC in fact irrelevant because the real momentum was with the unwinding of the carry trade (using US Dollar loans which had been priced low to borrow and speculate on the higher yielding Chinese Yuan).

FT Alphaville produced one of their series of articles (similar to gold repos, the London Whale and their previous series on Chinese Credit) which is excellent.  The BBC is covering the story in depth (finally, see also here and here).  The Economist had one reactionary article, which was more circumspect however analysing the assumptions (and questioning a couple of them) still could suggest a very concerning outcome.

Interestingly for the Economist and a subsqent article in FTAV, there is a suggestion that looking at available evidence, the Chinese Yuan may be overvalued and at risk of a currency collapse/devaluation.

If this is true, something will have to buckle soon. Either the renminbi will be forced to devalue, popping lots of dollar shorts as it goes — behold, dollar-denominated defaults galore — or China will finally be forced to release its USTs so as to avoid the messy fiasco and to honour its dollar debts, and prove it’s a credible country after all. 

To clarify, we’re not arguing the Chinese are using gold to manage the exchange rate, rather that gold is sending us an important signal that a great unwinding of the CNYUSD relationship may be upon us very soon. Also, — more importantly perhaps — that in the game of global currency wars, the Fed has come out on top. 

What happens next, of course, depends entirely on the degree to which China provides the liquidity its system is demanding and on the amount of dollar debt there actually is in the system. If it responds, the great unwind may be upon us quicker than we expected (which might explain why it’s so reluctant to do so). If it doesn’t… gold prices could be in for a rough ride in renminbi terms for some time still.

Apart from the sense of irony that the nation with the world's largest foreign reserves (acquired to protect against a devaluation) could suffer such a fate (and by the way calculations have questioned whether China's massive reserves would be sufficient in a case of full scale currency slide anyway), the outcome would be calamitous.  On this there are questions about the PBOC's ability to manage away from such an outcome.

3) Finally it is unclear if all the drama is having anything like the intended effect of slowing down alternative lending, or lending in general.  Not so says Bloomberg, while reports about the lending situation vary dramatically (see here and here).