China tightens grip on short-term foreign debt
(Shenzhen Daily/Agencies)
Updated: 2005-08-19 14:25

China is stepping up curbs on short-term foreign debt amid official concerns about capital inflows speculating on the yuan, the China Securities Journal said Thursday, quoting a senior foreign exchange official.

"The State Council and the People's Bank of China are both very concerned about the current situation concerning foreign debt," the newspaper quoted Li Dongrong, deputy chief of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), as saying.

"The SAFE has unveiled some new policies to standardise foreign debt management to help curb excessively rapid growth of short-term debt," he said without elaborating.

The newspaper quoted unidentified analysts as saying China needed to maintain "a stable environment" for capital flows following the country's currency reforms unveiled last month.

The central bank, revalued the yuan by 2.1 percent against the U.S. dollar last month in a long-awaited move that gives wider play to market forces in determining the exchange rate.

Last year, the Central Government made it tougher for companies to raise foreign debt out of concern that domestic firms were borrowing more from abroad in expectation of a revaluation of the yuan, which would make the foreign loans cheaper to repay.

China also set limits on short-term overseas borrowings by foreign banks to help curb speculative capital inflows.

China's total foreign debt hit US$233.41 billion at the end of March, up 2.1 percent from the end of last year, official data showed.

Short-term foreign debt, watched by economists as a barometer of corporate speculation on the yuan, rose US$3.57 billion, or 3.4 percent, in the first three months of 2005 to US$107.88 billion.

Although comparisons with earlier official data showed that short-term debt was up 31 percent on the year, the quarterly increase marked a slowdown from 4.6 percent in the last three months of 2004.

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