New credit added last month will be lower than market expectations. From the time window perspective, the market will enter a period of verifying data expectations in the next two weeks. Today, the Logistics and Purchasing Association will disclose PMI data, and starting from March 9th, the inflation, credit, and industrial added value data for January-February will be published successively. Among these, investors are most concerned about credit data; if liquidity supply continues to fall below expectations, it will negatively impact the market's short-term bullish sentiment.
As of last week, internal exchange data from the four major commercial banks showed that new loans in February remained at a low level of over 100 billion yuan, which may be similar to January. Considering that new loans from the four major banks account for approximately 40%-45% of all financial institutions, it is already quite optimistic to expect that total new loans from financial institutions in February could be basically the same as in January. Public information shows that in January, RMB loans increased by 738.1 billion yuan, down 288.2 billion yuan year-on-year. In January, the four major banks - Industrial, Agricultural, Bank of China, and Construction Bank - added 317.2 billion yuan in domestic loans, accounting for 43% of all new loans from financial institutions.
"Market expectations now are that new loans in February will be around 800 billion yuan, but I think this figure might be lower, around 60 billion yuan," said Liu Qi Yuan, macro analyst at Qilu Securities yesterday, implying that new credit will not be better than expected.
Overall, the main reason for the "off-season" phenomenon in the current credit market is insufficient effective demand. First, with enterprises slowing their investment, credit demand has decreased. Data shows that the direct discount rate in the Yangtze River Delta region has dropped from 9%-10% at the end of 2011 to 6%-7% currently, directly proving that enterprise discount demand has decreased. Second, regulation on real estate and local platform loans suppresses credit demand. As key areas for previous bank credit deployment, new loans for real estate and local platform loans are now strictly limited, leaving banks without alternative credit deployment areas and leading to weak credit growth.
Huatai United Securities stated that due to the impact of declining demand and loan-to-deposit ratio constraints, it is estimated that February's credit will be 650 billion yuan. At the same time, it is expected that M2 will grow by 12.7% year-on-year in February, and M1 will grow by 2.9% year-on-year. Jiang Cheng Jie, macro analyst at Shougang Securities, also stated that despite a slight increase in loan sources in February and banks' willingness to lend, lending will still be constrained by the loan-to-deposit ratio, with new credit potentially ranging from 500-600 billion yuan. http://www.xyxdw.com/