Saturday, January 7, 2017

Closing the tri-lemonade loop in Commie land

Balding's World deconstructs Chinese central bank operations:

I summarize his many points with selective quoting. 
First, the state owned enterprises short the yuan:


A big SOE wants to make a foreign acquisition.  They hive off the acquisition in an SPV with some amount of their own funded equity.   Then they sell a mixture of debt and equity to local investors via wealth management products for the amount of the acquisition to be made in RMB terms.  Here is where it gets good. The product is linked to a decline in the RMB giving investors in Beijing partial ownership of foreign assets and improved investment performance from a decline in the RMB. 
But:
The systemic problem is that NPLs in China are much higher and that banks don’t have the liquidity they should have because people are not making their payments.

My interpretation: The banks are allowed to borrow long term in the hopes that some day SOE will become profitable and make payments on loans (Non-performing loans) The SOE make money by shorting the debt, essentially,. the effect is to shove the imbalance up to the central bank.
That is called closing the loop and terminating the spiral with a helicopter run.

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