Chinese targeting steel with tight credit?

Advertisement
sdfs

The AFR has a nice scoop this morning of Chinese authorities directly targeting steel mills via tight credit:

Chinese authorities plan to cut off credit to inefficient steel mills and force some to close, raising the prospect of weaker demand for iron ore this year.

…the chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, Shang Fulin, said strict credit policies would be used to restructure the steel sector.

“Some of them [steel mills] need to be closed,” he said in Beijing on Tuesday.

“Our policy is to support industry restructuring and we will take active measures to encourage mergers and acquisitions for outdated production capacity and sectors suffering from over-capacity.”

As China’s top banking regulator, Mr Shang has the power to direct the lending policies of the country’s banks.

One wonders of this is not already underway and is contributing to the elaborate scams sending port stocks sky high.

Advertisement
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.