Central bank governor promises stronger support for private sector

BEIJING — China's central bank governor on Nov 6 pledged an array of policies to widen financing channels for the private sector.

"There is a lot of water in the monetary 'pool' but we need to channel the funds to cash-starved private businesses," Yi Gang, head of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), told Xinhua in an interview.

Yi cited policies in areas of bond issuance, bank loans and equity financing.

The PBOC has added a new index in the macro-prudential assessment for commercial banks and provided them with long-term, inexpensive credit funds to encourage more loans for private businesses, Yi said.

The central bank increased relending and rediscount quotas by a record 300 billion yuan ($43 billion) this year and lowered relending interest rates by 0.5 percentage points for small lenders.

Besides, China has decided to help the bond issuance by private companies, with liquidity support from the central bank.

Yi said a pilot has begun, under which the first batch of three companies raised a total of 1.9 billion yuan with their bonds highly oversubscribed. "Another 30 private businesses are preparing for the bond issuance."

The PBOC is also moving to support equity financing of private firms, the central bank governor said.

"The PBOC provides initial funds and encourages the participation of financial institutions and other investors," Yi said.

Yi stressed the financing difficulties for private companies, small- and medium-sized enterprises in particular, have become an entrenched problem across the world, and China will take more efforts to fix the "market failure."

China has maintained a prudent and neutral monetary policy environment and ensured reasonable and sufficient liquidity. The PBOC's cut in cash that banks must hold as reserves unleashed a net of 2.3 trillion yuan for the monetary market this year.

By the end of September, outstanding microloans stood at 7.73 trillion yuan, up 18.1 percent year-on-year. New microloans came in at 959.5 billion yuan in the first three quarters, 1.6 times more than such loans made last year.