China’s four biggest banks are among lenders who have been set differentiated reserve requirement ratios, said Liu Mingkang (劉明康), chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC).
Liu didn’t specify whether all four banks or only some were targeted, nor by what margin they were ordered to raise ratios. The regulator spoke to reporters while attending the closing session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing yesterday.
Liu didn’t say when the differentiated reserve requirement ratios were imposed or whether they are still in place.
Central bank officials, including Governor Zhou Xiaochuan (周小川), have said that they will use differentiated ratios in addition to the universal reserve requirement to curb lending. Under the system, individual lenders are told to hold differing amounts as reserves according to capital adequacy levels and lending growth.
The nation’s biggest four banks are Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC, 中國工商銀行), China Construction Bank Corp (中國建設銀行), Bank of China Ltd (中國工商銀行) and Agricultural Bank of China Ltd (中國農民銀行).
TARGETED BANKS
The People’s Bank of China has imposed differentiated reserve requirement ratios on 40 banks since January, Xinhua news agency -reported last month, citing an unnamed spokesman at the central bank. China has increased the overall reserve requirement for banks twice this year and raised interest rates once in a bid to curb inflation.
RAMPANT GROWTH
The 40 lenders targeted were local lenders, which had lower capital adequacy ratios and “rampant” growth in lending, Xinhua said, citing the spokesman. China’s central bank hasn’t publicly disclosed which banks were targeted and by how much their reserve requirements were raised.
Bank of China hasn’t been selected for the differentiated requirement, bank president Li Lihui (李禮輝) said in Beijing on March 5.
Liu also said yesterday that outstanding loans to the financing vehicles of local governments are now “under control” and that the banking regulator will closely monitor the situation.
The central bank has raised banks’ reserve requirement ratio eight times since the beginning of last year, excluding any extra requirements for individual lenders not publicly announced. The ratio now stands at 19.5 percent for the biggest banks.
Chinese banks extended 535.6 billion yuan (US$81.5 billion) of -local-currency loans last month, the central bank said yesterday. That was less than the 600 billion yuan median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of 19 economists.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
POLICY REVERSAL: The decision to allow sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China came after years of tightening controls and has drawn objections among some Republicans US House Republicans are calling for arms-sale-style congressional oversight of artificial intelligence (AI) chip exports as US President Donald Trump’s administration moves to approve licenses for Nvidia Corp to ship its H200 processor to China. US Representative Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, which oversees export controls, on Friday introduced a bill dubbed the AI Overwatch Act that would require the US Congress to be notified of AI chips sales to adversaries. Any processors equal to or higher in capabilities than Nvidia’s H20 would be subject to oversight, the draft bill says. Lawmakers would have
RSS