There are many similarities between the US, the UK and the Chinese housing markets, including the movements of interest rates and house prices. Some Chinese banks, especially the Bank of China, have been exposed to the US mortgage securitization market. These have triggered a serious concern as to whether the US credit crunch and housing market crisis may be replicated in China. This paper shows that there are some significant differences between China and the West, especially the US and the UK. Compared with the US and other western industrialized economies, the booming house market in China has been supported by fast economic growth, rapid urbanization and high domestic savings. In addition, Chinese banks are less exposed to mortgage defaults than their western counterparts because house buyers are mainly urban and high income residents who are required to have high down payments. These Sino-Western economic and social differences suggest that the US credit crunch and housing market crisis may have some negative impacts on Chinese commercial banks and the overall economy but are unlikely to cause a similar financial and housing crisis in China despite the current struggling Chinese stock markets and a slowdown of house price growth.

This paper studies the optimal scale and asset allocation of Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), taking China’s SWF as an example. We use the AR (1) process to simulate the future foreign exchange earnings of China and generate three patterns of the future earnings. With these three scenarios and based on Deaton’s precautionary saving model, we find that the optimal scale and asset allocation of China’s SWF mainly depend on the expected trend and fluctuation of the future foreign exchange earnings and expected yields that SWF can get. When foreign exchange earnings shows an upward trend, the scale of SWF should not be expanded even the expected investment yield is very high, and ratio of risky assets should be kept stable and high. When foreign exchange earnings is stabilized as its growth rate slows down, the scale of SWF has the positive correlation with the degree of earnings fluctuation and expected yield of investment, and also ratio of risky assets is generally lower. When foreign exchange earnings decrease, the scale of SWF should be expanded even the expected investment yield is not so high, and the ratio of risky assets is dependent on the characteristics of expected investment yields. We also conclude that investment policy of China’s SWF should follow Temasek’s investment model, under the current trend of China’s foreign exchange trend, and strive for high yield investment chances.

We examine whether the gains from incentive realignment have driven corporations out of the public security market. It is shown that going private transactions are due to the reduction in the diversification gains from the public market. The anticipated gains from incentive realignment are likely to be lowest among firms whose managers own most equity and the leverages are high. Avoiding the high cost of being public is the primary consideration for managers to take a firm private. Such firms go private because of financial distress and dwindling profitability. These kinds of going-private activities are counter-cyclical. On the other hand, a less distressed firm with diffused ownership has high anticipated incentive gains. The gain from incentive realignment is the dominant factor for these going-private transactions. Such firms go private because of an increase in profitability or an improvement in financial distress. We show that these going-private activities are pro-cyclical.

Chinese banks generate large profits and have relatively low nonperforming loans. However, good financial performance does not, in itself, guarantee that banks efficiently intermediate the economy’s financial resources. This paper first examines how efficient Chinese banks are in financial intermediation, using the stochastic production frontier approach. Quality of loans are controlled for by focusing on net loans and correcting for nonperforming loans; Hong Kong SAR banks are included in the sample to have a more universally representative production frontier. The results suggest that Chinese banks indeed became more efficient during 2001–07. Nevertheless, a majority of banks remain quite inefficient, including several large state owned banks and many city banks. Large banks tend to hoard deposits and operate beyond the point of diminishing returns to scale, while smaller banks operate at increasing returns to scale. This suggests that reallocating deposits from large to smaller banks would increase overall efficiency. The paper finds no significant correlation between bank efficiency and profitability. Possible factors leading to large profits in the banking system, despite wide-spread inefficiencies, are low deposit interest rates, large interest margins, and high market concentration. Moving to indirect monetary policy and deepening capital markets to channel some of the savings to productive investment would help improve the efficiency of financial intermediation. This may spur loan growth, however, which will need to be handled with monetary policy and regulatory/supervisory tools.

This paper analyzes empirically what explains the low profitability of Chinese banks for the period 1997-2004. We find that better capitalized banks tend to be more profitable. The same is true for banks with a relatively larger share of deposits and for more X-efficient banks. In addition, a less concentrated banking system increases bank profitability, which basically reflects that the four state-owned commercial banks - China’s largest banks - have been the main drag for system’s profitability. We find the same negative influence for China’s development banks (so called Policy Banks), which are fully state-owned. Instead, more market oriented banks, such as joint-stock commercial banks, tend to be more profitable, which again points to the influence of government intervention in explaining bank performance in China. These findings should not come as a surprise for a banking system which has long been functioning as a mechanism for transferring huge savings to meet public policy goals.

Our study shows that China could contribute to an orderly global rebalancing by a package of policies to stimulate its domestic consumption. These policies include a progressive appreciation of RMB, fiscal stimuli of increasing social expenditures on education, healthcare, social safety net and poverty reduction, income policies to reduce inequality and to strengthen wages income, and reforms of the financial system to improve financial efficiency and mitigate financial constraints. With these policies, China's external surplus can be narrowed along with an improvement of its domestic imbalances. The excessively high saving rate will be lowered and the share of household consumption will increase, even although GDP growth will moderate slightly.

传统的存贷利差就是贷款利率和存款利率之间的差额。本文利用金融工程学的基本原理提出了银行资产负债业务中隐含着期权的全新观点，因此银行的真实利差并不等于存贷款利率差额，还要考虑银行所承担的期权成本以及违约风险。文章对银行资产负债业务中隐含期权进行了分解，分析其隐含期权的特征以及各个因素对期权执行可能性的影响。接着通过两种方法――无套利分析和数值计算法对隐含期权进行了定价，并进行了期权价格对各个因素的敏感性分析，得出了许多具有重要创新意义的结论。分解之后可以发现银行的真实利差明显偏低，贷款动力明显不足。 The traditional saving-loan interest rate spread is just the spread between the loan rate and saving rate. By the methods of financial engineering, this paper points out that the basic asset and liability of bank includes some options which are sent to the customers for free by the bank. Then the real interest rate spread is not just the saving-loan rate spread, the options cost should be also considered. This paper decomposes the implied options in the asset and liability operations of bank, analyzes their characters and the impact of different factors on the execution possibility of option. Two methods, no arbitrage analysis and numerical methods are used to price the implied options and the sensitivity test of option price on different factors is given out. By these, many constructive conclusions are drawn out.

China’s non-performing loans were as high as 35 percent of state banks’ total loans, or about RMB 3,549 billion (about 40 percent of its GDP) in 2000. The adequacy ratios of the four state banks were only between 1.4 percent to 4.6 percent in September 2000. Moreover, non-bank financial institutions as a group as early as 1996 had non-performing assets equal to 50 percent of their total assets. By Western accounting standards, China’s most financial institutions are insolvent. Be conventional standards for measuring financial sector robustness, China is past the point at which a systemic banking crisis might be expected. China faces enormous risks delaying the state bank reforms due to increasing capital account leaks, increasing large proportion of household deposits in banks’ total liabilities, and gradual structural shift of Chinese saving behavior. China needs to resolutely address the financial reforms soon to avoid a financial crisis, which will lead to a broad anti-regime coalition against the Chinese government. Nevertheless, China faces enormous difficulties. First, the 2000 Chinese official estimate puts the financial cost of restructuring the state banks at RMB 2,260 billion ($273 billion), or close to 30 percent of GDP. Second, the current AMC scheme is fraught with difficulties. Finally, the required financial sector reforms are closely interlinked with many other reforms such that a sequential or partial approach will not be effective.

In this article we offer an explanation for price differentials between A and H shares based on the conventional asset pricing theory. We find that the risk premiums associated with the Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese Markets in a two-factor model successfully explain the cross section of returns on the A and H shares. We show that discounts on H shares relative to A shares are highly related to the contemporaneous discounts of H-share local market index relative to A-share local market index, as well as the spread of Hong Kong savings interest rate to Mainland China. The evidence suggests that the risk premiums associated with the segmented A- and H-share markets exert crucial impacts on the price differentials between the two classes of shares. The results thereby indicate that the movements of price discounts of H shares owned by non-Mainland investors in the Chinese stock markets is in accord with the rationality of Chinese investors.

It is commonly argued that poorly designed banking system safety nets are largely to blame for the frequency and severity of modern banking crises. For example, “underpriced” deposit insurance and/or low reserve requirement are often viewed as factors that encourages risk-taking by banks. In this paper, we study the effects of three policy variables: deposit insurance premia, reserve requirement and the way in which the costs of bank bailouts are financed. We show that when deposit insurance premia are low, the monetization of bank bailout costs may not be more inflationary than financing these costs out of general revenue. This is because, while monetizing the costs increases the inflation tax rate, higher levels of general taxation reduce savings, deposits, bank reserves, and the inflation tax base. Increasing the inflation tax rate obviously raises inflation, but so does an erosion of the inflation tax base. We also find that low deposit insurance premia or low reserve requirements may not be associated with a high rate of bank failure.