Chinese debt binge is fuelling a dangerous property bubble-SMH OPED 16 June 2010

Kevin Rudd may privately badmouth China, but his economic strategy is heavily dependent on continued strong Chinese growth. His earlier return to surplus depends on the new mining tax delivering massive new tax revenues. His new tax also obliges the Commonwealth to reimburse 40 per cent of unrecovered losses if a project fails. So were Chinese growth to slow, not only would mining tax revenues decline but, in a double whammy to the budget bottom line, if projects were to fail the Commonwealth would be called on to pick up its share of losses.

So how sound is the government’s assumption that the China boom will continue for many years?

China’s extraordinary growth and development is awe inspiring. But it is capable of making the same mistakes of excessive spending and borrowing as any other country.

As the historian Niall Ferguson recently observed, blow-outs in public debt are always and everywhere ”consequences of political weakness …Excessive expenditure and insufficient taxation, failures to make decisions about unsustainable fiscal policies are political, they are not the results of profound economic weakness.”

Working out the true level of government debt in China is very difficult. Nobody believes the official figures of about 20 per cent of GDP. But how much higher is it?

Victor Shih, of Northwestern University in Illinois, is the leading analyst of government debt in China and he has pointed to the way in which local governments have established their own local investment companies largely for the purpose of borrowing funds from Chinese banks to develop and invest in real estate.

He has estimated that when you take into account the massive indebtedness of the local investment companies, government-related debt in China would, by next year, be close to RMB 40 trillion ($7 trillion) or 96 per cent of GDP and 4.6 times government revenue.

Shih’s estimate would place China among the countries with the highest debt to GDP ratio, although it should be noted that China’s debt (like that of Japan) is almost entirely funded from its own domestic sources.

And those domestic sources are the prudent households of China who have been depositing their savings in banks at deliberately depressed official interest rates. By lending at low, indeed negative real, interest rates the thrifty households of China have been subsidising what is all-too-often speculative and wasteful investment by government-owned companies.

Another China economist, Michael Pettis, points out that this effective financial subsidy by households to the banks and their customers amounts to at least 5 per cent of GDP a year and possibly up to twice that.

This raw deal for depositors is helping to fuel the property bubble. When Chinese banks are offering depositors a guaranteed loss after inflation of 1 to 2 per cent a year, is it any wonder that Chinese families are jumping into the property boom in the belief that residential property is a “hard asset” that holds value – unlike cash, which certainly does not. One property analyst was very candid when asked why there were so many apparently unoccupied flats in Beijing as there were no lights on at night: “The flats are occupied. Cash is living there.”

HSBC recently calculated that the total value of China’s residential property market was now 3.27 times GDP, which is nearly twice the peak reached before the subprime crisis in the US and approaching the levels in Japan during its 1980s property bubble.

Asset bubbles are like a Ponzi scheme – everything is fine until the cash dries up and asset prices stop rising. Like it or not we are exposed to the Chinese property bubble. The iron ore China buys from Australia is turned into steel, and most of that goes into building apartments and infrastructure. Our bauxite and alumina exports are turned into aluminium, of which about 40 per cent goes into construction in China.

So at the same time as we congratulate ourselves on escaping from the consequences of the property bust in the United States, the resources boom that underpinned our strong economic performance is itself based on another debt-fuelled property boom in China.

The Chinese government is acutely aware of the risks of the local government debt binge and consequent property bubble creating what the leading economist Fan Gang recently described as “an internal ‘Greek crisis’ “. And apart from the threat to bank balance sheets, rapid inflation in property values prices young families out of the housing market.

Already the Chinese government has announced it will reform real estate taxes, and most believe this will result in a new annual property tax.

Li Daokui, a member of the central bank’s monetary policy committee, has also called for an increase in the interest rates paid on bank deposits. This would better reward Chinese households for their thrift and reduce the flow of cheap money to property development. As part of this credit tightening policy, the China Banking Regulatory Commission has increased the capital and provisioning requirements for Chinese banks, with a director, Liao Min, saying: “We are ready to take the punch bowl away.”

Hopefully a combination of fiscal discipline and solid, if somewhat slower, growth will resolve China’s debt and property bubble without any damaging economic shocks – either there or here.