China’s new lending rose to 548.5 billion yuan (US$85.9 billion) last month and money supply growth expanded at the slowest pace in at least six years.
New local-currency lending compared with the 500 billion yuan median estimate in a Bloomberg News Survey of 26 economists and 492.6 billion yuan in July. M2, the broadest measure of money supply, rose 13.5 percent, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on its Web site yesterday.
That compared with the 14.2 percent median estimate in the survey and a 14.7 percent gain in July, the slowest pace since at least January 2005, Bloomberg data showed.
Beijing may pause on monetary policy tightening as its economy moderates amid Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s (溫家寶) campaign to cool inflation and the property -market, and as the outlook for global growth weakens.
China faces a “very complicated, unstable and uncertain environment both at home and abroad,” Wen said last week.
“There should be no more interest rate hikes this year given the slowing domestic economy, easing inflation and deteriorating external growth outlook,” Chang Jian (常建), an economist at Barclays Capital in Hong Kong, who formerly worked for the World Bank, said before the release. “Yet some selective or targeted easing is expected in the months ahead.”
The central bank started last Monday to widen its reserve requirements to include lenders’ margin deposits, a move that will be phased in over the next six months and is estimated by some banks to withdraw 900 billion yuan from the bank system.
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