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China’s Corporate Debt Unexpectedly Rises At Fastest Pace In Four Years, As A New Risk Emerges

November 25, 2017

China’s Corporate Debt Unexpectedly Rises At Fastest Pace In Four Years, As A New Risk Emerges

Have you heard the one about the priest, the rabbi and China’s deleveraging? We forget how it goes, but it’s pretty damn funny, especially the last part after a Reuters report that following China’s repeated vows by Beijing it would reduce the country’s unprecedented sovereign, municipal, corporate and household leverage, China’s debt is not only rising, but growing at the fastest pace in four years.

It’s especially funny because for years China’s top officials have – well – lied, touting their ambitious policy priority to wean the world’s second-largest economy off high levels of debt, but there is not much to show for it. On the contrary, the debt pile at Chinese firms has been climbing in that time, with levels at the end of September growing at the fastest pace in four years.

As shown in the chart below, a Reuters analysis of 2,146 China listed firms showed their total debt at the end of September jumped 23% from a year ago, the highest pace of growth since 2013. The analysis covered three-fifths of the country’s listed firms, but excluded financials, which have seen the brunt of government de-risking and deleveraging efforts so far.

The analysis revealed that debt in the real estate sector increased the most over last five years, followed by industrials, with the share of industrials in China’s total corporate debtload going up by 3% psince the end of 2012, while relative real estate debt rose by 7%.

In September, as shown here before, state-owned enterprises also reported a much faster pace of growth in their debt, as the government quietly backstopped quasi-private companies. In addition, last month we reported that as part of China’s latest bailout of the financial sysmte, Beijing was set to buy 24% of all residential real estate offered for sale in 2017.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Savings Guarantee? U.N. Warns Next Financial Crisis Imminent

September 24, 2016

Savings Guarantee? U.N. Warns Next Financial Crisis Imminent

“There remains a risk of deflationary spirals in which capital flight, currency devaluations and collapsing asset prices would stymie growth and shrink government revenues. As capital begins to flow out, there is now a real danger of entering a third phase of the financial crisis …”

UN Conference on Trade and Development’s Annual Report (UNCTAD), September 22, 2016

image (5)Image from “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay – Wikipedia

This hard hitting critique in the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s Annual Report, released this week, is suggesting that the ‘third leg of the world’s intractable depression is yet to come.’

“Alarm bells have been ringing over the explosion of corporate debt levels in emerging economies, which now exceed $25 trillion. Damaging deflationary spirals cannot be ruled out,” said the annual report of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

But what does these grand, scary predictions really mean for us? Bankruptcy? Economic collapse? Apocalypse now? End of the world as we know it?

The UN economists certainly think that a la 2007/2008, we are on the verge of the third leg of the global financial crisis – with prospect of epic debt defaults.

We may soon experience the end of the financial world as we know it … but investors and savers feel fine! Many bond and stock markets, including the S&P 500, continue on their merry way to all time record highs.

Few know, or (it seems) care anymore. As we end yet another week with yet another anticlimactic announcement from the “all powerful” Fed, it is understandable that many of us are feeling some cognitive dissonance when it comes to the real impact of central bank announcements, economic forecasts and political changes.

Bail-In Regime Cometh

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Bank For International Settlements Warns That A Major Debt Meltdown In China Is Imminent

September 23, 2016

The Bank For International Settlements Warns That A Major Debt Meltdown In China Is Imminent

chinese-money-public-domainThe pinnacle of the global financial system is warning that conditions are right for a “full-blown banking crisis” in China.  Since the last financial crisis, there has been a credit boom in China that is really unprecedented in world history.  At this point the total value of all outstanding loans in China has hit a grand total of more than 28 trillion dollars.  That is essentially equivalent to the commercial banking systems of the United States and Japan combined.  While it is true that government debt is under control in China, corporate debt is now 171 percent of GDP, and it is only a matter of time before that debt bubble horribly bursts.  The situation in China has already grown so dire that the Bank for International Settlements is sounding the alarm…

A key gauge of credit vulnerability is now three times over the danger threshold and has continued to deteriorate, despite pledges by Chinese premier Li Keqiang to wean the economy off debt-driven growth before it is too late.

The Bank for International Settlements warned in its quarterly report that China’s “credit to GDP gap” has reached 30.1, the highest to date and in a different league altogether from any other major country tracked by the institution. It is also significantly higher than the scores in East Asia’s speculative boom on 1997 or in the US subprime bubble before the Lehman crisis.

Studies of earlier banking crises around the world over the last sixty years suggest that any score above ten requires careful monitoring.

If you are not familiar with the Bank for International Settlements, just think of it as the capstone of the worldwide financial pyramid.  It wields enormous global power, and yet it is accountable to nobody.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Horror Stories Emerge After A Cursory Look At Chinese Corporate Leverage

February 8, 2016

Horror Stories Emerge After A Cursory Look At Chinese Corporate Leverage

By now it is common knowledge that China has a major debt problem at the macro level, one which may be even bigger than expected because according to at least one analysis by Rabobank, China’s most recent debt has soared from the infamous McKinsey level of 282% as of mid 2014, to an unprecedented 346% currently.

Far less has been discussed about China’s corporate debt at the micro level. Back in October we were shocked when we looked at the inverse of corporate leverage, namely interest coverage within the heavily indebted commodity sector where we found that as of the end of 2014, just one half of Chinese companies could cover their annual interest expense, implying that according to a Macquarie analysis, some CNY2 trillion in debt was in danger of default.

This was over a year ago: since then both industry pricing and cash flow dynamics have deteriorated substantially and some estimate that more than three-quarters of leveraged commodity companies are dead zombies walking, suggesting a massive default wave is about to be unleashed.

And while we are keeping a close eye on this very troublesome development, last week the FT revealed something even more disturbing: Chinese corporate leverage, represented by the traditional debt/EBITDA ratio is, in some cases, absolutely ludicrous, especially among companies which in recent weeks have tried to mask their balance sheet devastation through global M&A activity, such as ChemChina’s recent record for a Chinese company $44 billion purchase of Syngenta, or Zoomlion’s $3.3 bid for US rival Terex last month.

In fact, as the otherwise demure FT notes, “so high are the debt levels at ChemChina and several other companies behind some of the country’s biggest overseas investments that financing for the deals would have been difficult or prohibitively expensive were it not for the backing of the Chinese state, analysts said.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chinese Cash Flow Shocker: More Than Half Of Commodity Companies Can’t Pay The Interest On Their Debt

October 2, 2015

Chinese Cash Flow Shocker: More Than Half Of Commodity Companies Can’t Pay The Interest On Their Debt

Earlier today, Macquarie released a must-read report titled “Further deterioration in China’s corporate debt coverage”, in which the Australian bank looks at the Chinese corporate debt bubble (a topic familiar to our readers since 2012) however not in terms of net leverage, or debt/free cash flow, but bottom-up, in terms of corporate interest coverage, or rather the inverse: the ratio of interest expense to operating profit. With good reason, Macquarie focuses on the number of companies with “uncovered debt”, or those which can’t even cover a full year of interest expense with profit.

The report’s centerprice chart is impressive. It looks at the bond prospectuses of 780 companies and finds that there is about CNY5 trillion in total debt, mostly spread among Mining, Smelting & Material and Infrastructure companies, which belongs to companies that have a Interest/EBIT ratio > 100%, or as western credit analysts would write it, have an EBIT/Interest < 1.0x.

As Macquarie notes, looking at the entire universe of CNY22 trillion in corporate debt, the “percentage of EBIT-uncovered debt went up from 19.9% in 2013 to 23.6% last year, and the percentage of EBITDA-uncovered debt up from 5.3% to 7%. Therefore, there has been a further deterioration in financial soundness among our sample.”

To be sure, both the size (the gargantuan CNY22 trillion) and the deteriorating quality (the surge in “uncovered debt” companies) of cash flows, was generally known.

What wasn’t known were the specifics of just how severe this bubble deterioration was for the most critical for China, in the current deflationary bust, commodity sector.

We now know, and the answer is truly terrifying.

Macquarie lays it out in just three charts.

First, it shows the “debt-coverage” curve for commodity companies as of 2007. One will note that not only is there virtually no commodity sector debt to discuss, at not even CNY1 trillion in debt, but virtually every company could comfortably cover their interest expense with existing cash flow: only 4 companies – all in the cement sector – had “uncovered debt” 8 years ago.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Is Another “Subprime” Waiting to Blow

September 11, 2015

This Is Another “Subprime” Waiting to Blow

Dow down 239 points yesterday – or 1.5% – after Japan posted its biggest one-day gain in seven years. This is getting interesting again. If it is just “volatility,” as Wall Street’s shills in the press maintain, it will probably pass soon. Everything will be okay. Back to routine imbecility before the end of the month.

But if these whipsaw movements are heralding a bear market, U.S. stock prices could be cut in half… or more. And they may not recover for 10 to 20 years. (Catch up on the details of our bear market forecast here.)

Bull or Bear?

Which is it? Bull or Bear? No one knows, of course. But it looks to us as though the whole shebang is getting ready to collapse. So far, the correction has trimmed $12.5 trillion off the value of global stock markets. There are a few reasons for stocks to go back up… and many reasons why they might want to go down further.

The 2008 global financial crisis was centered on mortgage debt. There was too much of it that couldn’t be repaid. When the value of the collateral – homes – headed down, the bubble popped.

Today, consumers have about the same amount of debt. But now the excesses are in auto loans and student debt. As you can see below, total auto loans stood at about $781 billion in 2007. Today, they’ve topped $1 trillion. And student loans have more than doubled over that time to $1.3 trillion.

091015 DRE Student and Auto Loan Debt Chart

Again, the collateral is falling in value. Used-car prices fall, as leases expire and more used cars hit the market. As for student debt, the “collateral” is the earning power of the person who borrowed the money.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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