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Prospective buyers attend a real estate trade fair in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, on Oct 3, 2016. [Photo/For China Daily]
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BEIJING - China will control its credit growth and take active measures to promote the healthydevelopment of the housing market, a central bank statement said Saturday.
Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, was quoted as saying that China'scredit expansion has slowed and growth will be controlled in the future along with a steadyrecovery in the global economy.
He made the remarks while co-chairing the Fourth G20 Finance Ministers and Central BankGovernors Meeting with Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei in Washington Thursday.
Lou Jiwei said China has trailed developed countries in deleveraging following the financialcrisis while deploying massive stimulus plans, which have helped tackle the crisis but led to risingdebt rates and overcapacity.
As China trims its overcapacity, moderate credit growth could act as a countercylical tool, Zhousaid.
The central bank said earlier that it intends to continue its prudent monetary policy and maintain aproper level of liquidity, while using various monetary policy tools flexibly to maintain reasonablegrowth of monetary credit and social financing.
Zhou also noted that the Chinese government is very concerned about the recent rise in homeprices and will take active measures to regulate the market.
His remarks came amid tougher regulations in the housing markets of both first-tier cities suchas Beijing and Shenzhen as well as smaller second- and third-tier cities.
Prices in 100 major Chinese cities rose 14.9 percent in the first nine months of 2016, with Augustand September seeing record month-on-month growth of more than 2 percent, according to theChina Index Academy (CIA), a private property research institute.
As of Oct. 6, a total of 19 Chinese cities had rolled out policies in the past week ranging fromhigher down payments and home purchase restrictions to curb speculative housing purchases.
Markus Rodlauer, deputy director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s Asia PacificDepartment, told Xinhua Friday that the rising prices are not sustainable and will fall back withregulators hitting the brakes.
Shrinking profits in the real economy and expectations of yuan devaluation have led to capitalflooding the property market, CIA said.
China's new yuan-denominated lending in August more than doubled from a month ago to 948.7billion yuan (about 145.95 billion U.S. dollars), with mortgages representing 55.7 percent of the529 billion yuan in household loans, PBOC data showed.
Chang Yong Rhee, Director of IMF's Asia and Pacific Department, advised China to advancestructural reform as China's credit grows at twice the speed of the economy, mainly driven bydemand from the property market rather than enterprises.
China is making headway in improving its economic structure and efficiency as it enters a "newnormal" of medium-to-high-speed growth, Zhou said, adding that new growth momentum isgrowing as the fundamentals of the economy point to long-term sound performance.
The PBOC has said it will continue reforms to the financial system to encourage efficiency andbetter serve the real economy in line with the requirements of supply-side structural reform.
China's economy grew 6.7 percent in the second quarter of the year, the lowest quarterly growthrate since the global financial crisis in early 2009, but still within the government's target range of6.5-7 percent for 2016
