"The mother of all debt bombs"?

That's what The Diplomat suggests Chinese banks may be hiding at present.  Here's an excerpt from their article.

Financial collapses may have different immediate triggers, but they all originate from the same cause: an explosion of credit.  This iron law of financial calamity should make us very worried about the consequences of easy credit in China in recent years.  From the beginning of 2009 to the end of June this year, Chinese banks have issued roughly 35 trillion yuan ($5.4 trillion) in new loans, equal to 73 percent of China's GDP in 2011. About two-thirds of these loans were made in 2009 and 2010, as part of Beijing's stimulus package.  Unlike deficit-financed stimulus packages in the West, China's colossal stimulus package of 2009 was funded mainly by bank credit (at least 60 percent, to be exact), not government borrowing.

. . .

When the Chinese Central Bank (the People's Bank of China) and banking regulators sounded the alarm in late 2010, it was already too late.  By that time, local governments had taken advantage of loose credit to amass a mountain of debt, most of it squandered on prestige projects or economically wasteful investments.  The National Audit Office of China acknowledged in June 2011 that local government debt totaled 10.7 trillion yuan (U.S. $1.7 trillion) at the end of 2010.  However, Professor Victor Shih of Northwestern University has estimated that the real amount of local government debt was between 15.4 and 20.1 trillion yuan, or between 40 and 50% of China’s GDP.  Of this amount, he further estimated, the local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which are financial entities established by local governments to invest in infrastructure and other projects, owed between 9.7 and 14.4 trillion yuan at the end of 2010.

Anybody with some knowledge of the state of health of LGFVs would shudder at these numbers.  If anything, Chinese LGFVs are known mainly for their unique ability to sink perfectly good money into bottomless holes in the ground.  So taking on such a huge mountain of debt can mean only one thing — a future wave of default when the projects into which LGFVs have piled funds fail to yield viable returns to service the debt.  If 10 percent of these loans turn bad, a very conservative estimate, we are talking about total bad loans in the range of 1 to 1.4 trillion yuan.  If the share of dud loans should reach 20 percent, a far more likely scenario, Chinese banks would have to write down 2 to 2.8 trillion yuan, a move sure to destroy their balance sheets.

. . .

Disturbingly, none of these huge risks are reflected in the financial statements of Chinese banks. The largest state-owned banks have all recently reported solid earnings, high capital ratios, and negligible non-performing loans. For the banking sector as a whole, non-performing loans amount to only 1 percent of total outstanding credit.

One things is evident here. Either we should not believe our "lying eyes" or Chinese banks are trying to hide the mother of all debt bombs.

There's more at the link.

If this report is true, it's a nightmare prospect not only for China, but for the world economy.  China is now the manufacturing engine of the world.  Most of the First World's consumer products are now produced in Chinese factories.  If a financial disaster strikes that country, the rest of the world no longer has the production capacity to manufacture those goods elsewhere.

Furthermore, note the history of most authoritarian governments (including China's) when faced with internal crises.  Overwhelmingly, their response has been to try to focus the attention of their people on external factors - blaming other countries for the problems, or whipping up nationalistic feelings against perceived outside interference in particular issues.  The current dispute over the South China Sea is one such issue . . . and that should make the other nations involved in it very nervous indeed.  Since the USA is an ally of several of them, we're likely to be dragged into the fuss, too, whether we like it or not.

Peter