BAD loan ratios at Chinese banks edged up to around 1 percent during the first half of this year and there's no money shortfall in the banking system, Sheng Laiyun, spokesman of the National Bureau of Statistics said today.
China's banking system didn't lack liquidity given the financial indicators announced by the central bank for the first half of the year. Additional, the system has a relatively high quality of assets, as the bad loan ratio was maintained at around 1 percent during the period, said Sheng at a news conference in Beijing.
Total social financing, the broadest measure of credit supply in China, amounted to 10.15 trillion yuan (US$1.64 trillion) in the first half, up more than 20 percent from the same period in 2012, according to the People's Bank of China.
Despite a slight increase in the bad loan ratio from a year earlier, the level of bad loans was still kept low. Moreover, the provision coverage ratio, a measure of money set aside by lenders for potential bad debt losses, was as high as 280 percent by the end of June, according to Sheng.
Bad loan ratio of all Chinese lenders was 0.96 percent by the end of March, while provision coverage was 292 percent, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission data.