为什么“中国金融末日” 的预言没有成功

为什么“中国金融末日”没有成为现实

陈志武  2023年3月27日
 
香港——还记得恒大危机吗？一年多以前，中国房地产开发商恒大集团背负着超过3000亿美元的债务，即将倒闭。有人警告，灾难性的违约将波及中国经济，甚至可能引发全球经济萧条。有人说，中国正面临“雷曼时刻”——2008年，这家曾经备受尊敬的华尔街投资银行倒闭——当有企业出现类似的倒闭情况时，最终会迫使中国共产党的政策制定者开始考虑系统性的金融缺陷。
 
不完全是这样。恒大并没有脱离困境，但在中国政府出手帮助，安排对其大部分债务进行重组后，一场灾难性的内爆得以避免。在本月出现对全球金融秩序的新威胁——美国硅谷银行倒闭——之前，恒大在很大程度上已经不再是大新闻。
 
恒大的麻烦并不是我们第一次听到有关中国金融末日的预言。它们往往每隔几年就会重新出现。但是重复该预言的华尔街、西方媒体和经济学家们犯了一个根本性的错误，那就是把纯粹的市场逻辑应用到中国经济上，这种逻辑是行不通的。

 

尽管中国在2001年加入了世界贸易组织，进行了数十年的经济改革，缓慢而稳步地融入全球金融体系，但它仍然不是一个完全的市场经济国家。

这并不意味着中国可以无限期地挑战经济正统理论，而且其金融体系的债务水平已经高得惊人。但这种悲观情绪通常被夸大了，因为中国政府拥有几乎无限的权力，可以按照自己认为合适的方式引导资源——并且分配痛苦——来避免危机，通常是在事情失控之前，命令银行和其他债权人以大局为重，接受损失。
恒大就是最好的例子。作为中国最大的房地产开发商之一，该公司为扩大业务而积累了巨额债务，它的许多竞争对手也是如此。但当中国政府出于对债务和房价飙升的担忧，于2020年开始对房地产公司实施金融限制时，恒大被切断了进一步融资的渠道，并于2021年12月正式违约。“雷曼时刻”的警告达到了顶峰。
但中国官员已经着手工作，召集恒大高管、债权人和潜在资产买家，开始重组该公司的债务。国内放贷者最终同意给恒大更多偿还贷款的时间。据报道，解决恒大海外债务的协议也即将达成。
2008年，美国联邦储备委员会和财政部也在次贷危机期间介入，协调陷入困境的金融机构的重组工作。但是债权人和投资者的权利以及救助银行的政治风险，限制了美国监管机构能做的事情；在与银行和投资公司艰苦谈判后，双方才达成协议。而在中国，金融机构必须听从政府的安排。
政府的手无处不在。中国最基本的资产——土地——由国家拥有或控制。中国货币人民币的价值由政府管理，人们普遍认为监管机构会干预中国股市的交易。
 
中国规模最大、实力最强的企业大部分都由国家所有，包括所有主要银行，高管通常是共产党员，而共产党控制着企业高层的任命。公司内部的党委进一步确保许多重要的商业决策与政府政策保持一致。即使是健康的、有影响力的民营企业，也可能被勒令进行痛苦的重组，或削减某些业务，政府从2020年开始对电子商务领导者阿里巴巴和其他中国科技巨头的打击行动就表明了这一点。
归根结底，所有这些都是为了维护社会稳定，这是党的绝对优先事项；对于可能引发街头示威的财务困境或重大企业倒闭，政府持零容忍态度。政府对商业部门的控制只会越来越强。
对监管机构来说，就连中国高债务水平的构成也有相对乐观的部分。2022年9月，中国债务与国内生产总值的总比率接近300%（约52万亿美元），而美国为257%。但中国只有不到5%的债务是外部债务，总计2.5万亿美元，是美国债务水平的十分之一。几乎每一笔人民币借款都是由中国债权人借给中国借款人，这让监管机构对债务问题有了一定程度的控制，这是西方同行只能梦想的场景。
在向现代工业经济转型的几十年里，中国也曾遭遇过金融危机，但监管机构利用其相当大的权力，多次阻止了灾难的发生。1999年，中国国有商业银行的不良贷款比例达到了惊人的30%（相比之下，美国的不良贷款比例几十年来一直保持在个位数），当局成立了资产管理公司来接管这些不良贷款。在2008年金融危机期间，中国实施了大规模刺激计划以保护其经济。
尽管如此，有关中国金融灾难的警告仍不时就会出现。2014年，当一家中国太阳能电池板制造商债券违约时，一些人说这可能是中国的“贝尔斯登时刻”，指的是2008年倒闭的另一家美国投资银行。但现在还有人记得那家中国公司的名字吗？（上海超日太阳能科技股份有限公司，如果有人想知道）。
 
但中国的恒大式修复方案虽然化解了短期危机，却没有引入改革来建立一个健康的、允许低效的企业倒闭的市场经济，而是奖励不负责任的行为，使过度借贷和浪费资金的现象长期存在，导致反复出现金融困境。
中国可能面临着与日本同样的命运，这是一个非常现实的风险。日本仍在努力摆脱始于上世纪90年代的长期经济停滞。该国的问题在一定程度上是由房地产泡沫破裂和金融部门的问题造成的，这些都与中国目前面临的问题类似。
中国监管部门的问题解决者们一次又一次地证明了金融末日预言者的错误。但他们最大的考验可能还在前面。

陈志武是香港人文社会科学研究所所长、香港大学金融学讲席教授。1999年至2017年间，他是耶鲁大学的金融学教授。

翻译：纽约时报中文网

Mr. Chen is the director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and an expert on China’s financial system.

HONG KONG — Remember the Evergrande crisis?

It was little more than a year ago that Evergrande Group, the Chinese property developer, was about to collapse under more than $300 billion in debt. There were warnings of a catastrophic default that would ripple through China’s economy, maybe even set off a global depression. China, it was said, faced its Lehman Brothers moment — when a corporate failure like that which felled the once-venerable Wall Street investment bank in 2008 finally forces Chinese Communist Party policymakers to reckon with systemic financial weakness.

Not quite. Evergrande is not out of the woods, but a catastrophic implosion was avoided after the Chinese government stepped in to help arrange a restructuring of much of its debt. Well before a new threat to the global financial order emerged this month — the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the United States — Evergrande had largely fallen out of the headlines.

Evergrande’s troubles weren’t the first time we’ve heard predictions of Chinese financial doom. They tend to resurface every few years. But Wall Street, the Western media and economists who repeat them make the fundamental mistake of applying pure market logic to China’s economy, and it just doesn’t work that way.

China is still not a fully market economy, despite the country’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization, decades of economic reform and a slow but steady integration into the global financial system.

That doesn’t mean China can indefinitely defy economic orthodoxy, and debt levels in its financial system are alarmingly high. But the doom and gloom are usually overblown because the government has virtually unlimited power to head off crises by directing resources — and apportioning pain — as it sees fit, often by ordering banks and other creditors to accept losses for the greater good before things get out of hand.

Evergrande is a prime example. One of China’s largest real estate developers, it amassed huge debts to expand its business, as did many of its rivals. But when China’s government began imposing financial restrictions on property companies in 2020 out of concern over spiraling debt and home prices, Evergrande was cut off from further fund-raising and formally defaulted on its debts in December 2021. The “Lehman” warnings reached a crescendo.

But Chinese officials had already been at work corralling Evergrande executives, creditors and potential asset buyers to begin restructuring the company’s obligations. Domestic lenders eventually agreed to give Evergrande more time to repay loans. A deal to resolve Evergrande’s offshore debt also is reportedly imminent.

In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department also stepped in during the subprime lending crisis to coordinate the restructuring of troubled institutions. But creditor and investor rights and the political risks of bailing out banks limited what American regulators can do; arrangements were reached only after hard bargaining with banks and investment houses. In China, financial institutions have to do what the government tells them.

The government’s hand is everywhere. The most fundamental asset in China — land — is owned or controlled by the state. The value of China’s currency, the renminbi, is government-managed and regulators are widely believed to intervene in trading on the country’s stock markets.

 

Most of China’s biggest and most powerful companies, including all of its major banks, are state-owned, and executives are usually members of the Communist Party, which controls top-level corporate appointments. Party committees within corporations further ensure that many important business decisions align with government policy. Even healthy and influential private companies can be ordered to undergo painful restructuring or curtail certain business operations, as a government crackdown on the e-commerce leader Alibaba and other Chinese tech giants that began in 2020 made clear.

Ultimately, all of this serves the party’s absolute priority of maintaining social stability; there is zero tolerance for financial distress or major corporate failures that could trigger street demonstrations. And government control of the business sector is only increasing.

Even the makeup of China’s high debt levels has a silver lining for regulators. China’s aggregate ratio of debt to gross domestic product was almost 300 percent (or around $52 trillion) in September 2022, compared to 257 percent for the United States. But less than 5 percent of China’s debt is external, amounting to $2.5 trillion, one-tenth of the U.S. level. When nearly every renminbi borrowed is domestic — lent by a Chinese creditor to a Chinese borrower — it gives regulators a degree of control over debt problems that their Western counterparts can only dream of.

China has encountered its share of financial distress during its decades-long transition to a modern industrial economy, but regulators have used their considerable powers to repeatedly prevent catastrophe. When the percentage of nonperforming loans at Chinese state-owned commercial banks hit an alarming 30 percent in 1999 (the U.S. rate, by comparison, has remained in single digits for decades), authorities formed asset management companies to take over those bad loans. During the 2008 financial crisis, China implemented a massive stimulus package to protect its economy.

Still, warnings of a Chinese financial reckoning resurface now and again. In 2014, when a Chinese solar-panel manufacturer defaulted on bonds, some intoned that this could be China’s “Bear Stearns moment,” referring to another U.S. investment bank that collapsed in 2008. But can anyone even remember the name of that Chinese company anymore? (Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science and Technology, for the record.)

 

But instead of introducing reforms to establish a healthy market-based economy in which inefficient businesses are allowed to fail, China’s Evergrande-style fixes — while defusing short-term crises — reward irresponsible behavior and perpetuate the excessive borrowing and wasteful use of funding that leads to recurring financial distress.

Soft landings may become harder to achieve. China faces perhaps its greatest array of economic challenges since it began reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s: high debt, an ailing real estate sector, a long-term economic slowdown, rising unemployment, an aging and shrinking population and worsening trade and diplomatic relations with the United States.

There is a very real risk that China could suffer the same fate as Japan, which is still struggling to emerge from an extended period of economic stagnation that began in the 1990s. Japan’s troubles were caused, in part, by a burst real estate bubble and financial-sector problems similar to what China is now facing.

China’s regulatory troubleshooters have proved the financial doomsayers wrong again and again. But their biggest test may yet lie ahead.

 

Zhiwu Chen is the director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and a chair professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong. He was a professor of finance at Yale University from 1999 to 2017.

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