"China has a history of taking debt off its books and burying it, which should prompt us to poke and prod its numbers. If we go back to the last time China cooked the national books big time, during the Asian currency crisis of 1997, we can get an idea of where its debt might be hidden now."
The majority of bank loans, says Jubak, went to state-owned companies -- about 70% of the total. The collapse of China's export trade following the crisis meant that its banks were suddenly sitting on billions in debts that were clearly never going to be paid. But that was when China's largest banks were trying to raise capital by selling stock in Hong Kong and New York, and no bank could go public with that much bad debt on its books.
The creative solution? The Beijing government set up special-purpose asset management companies for the four largest state-owned banks, the equivalent of the "special purpose vehicles" designed by Wall Street to funnel real estate loans off U.S. bank books. The Chinese entities ultimately bought $287 billion in bad loans from state-owned banks. To pay for the loans, they issued bonds to the banks, on which they paid interest. The state-owned banks thus got $287 billion in toxic debt off their books and turned the bad loans into an income stream from the bonds.
Sound familiar? Wall Street did the same thing in the 2008 bailout, with the U.S. government underwriting the deal. The difference was that China's largest banks were owned by the government, so the government rather than a private banking cartel got the benefit of the arrangement. According to British economist Samah El-Shahat, writing in Al Jazeera in August 2009:
"China hasn't allowed its banking sector to become so powerful, so influential, and so big that it can call the shots or highjack the bailout. In simple terms, the government preferred to answer to its people and put their interests first before that of any vested interest or group. And that is why Chinese banks are lending to the people and their businesses in record numbers."
In the US and UK, by contrast:
"[B]anks have captured all the money from the taxpayers and the cheap money from quantitative easing from central banks. They are using it to shore up, and clean up their balance sheets rather than lend it to the people. The money has been hijacked by the banks, and our governments are doing absolutely nothing about that. In fact, they have been complicit in allowing this to happen."
Today, Jubak continues, China's debt problem is the thousands of investment companies set up by local governments to borrow money from banks and lend it to local companies, a policy that has produced thousands of jobs but has left an off-balance-sheet debt overhang. He cites economist Victor Shih, who says local-government investment companies had a total of $1.7 trillion in outstanding debt at the end of 2009, or about 35% of China's GDP. Banks have extended $1.9 trillion in credit lines to local investment companies on top of that. Collectively, the debt plus the credit lines come to $3.8 trillion. That is about 75% of China's GDP, which is proportionately quite a bit smaller than U.S. GDP. None of this is included in the IMF's calculation of a gross-debt-to-GDP figure of 22%, says Shih. If it were, the number would be closer to 100% of GDP.
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