China’s bond market intervention reveals financial stability worries

BEIJING — China’s latest efforts to stem a bond market rally reveals wider worries among authorities about financial stability, analysts said.

Slow economic growth and tight capital controls have concentrated domestic funds in China’s government bond market, one of the largest in the world. Bloomberg reported Monday, citing sources, that regulators told commercial banks in Jiangxi province not to settle their purchases of government bonds.

Futures showed prices for the 10-year Chinese government bond tumbled to their lowest in nearly a month on Monday, before recovering modestly, according to Wind Information data. Prices move inversely to yields.

“The sovereign bond market is the backbone of the financial sector, even if you run a bank-driven sector like China [or] Europe,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific at Natixis.

She pointed out that in contrast to electronic trading of the bonds by retail investors or asset managers in Europe, banks and insurers tend to hold the government bonds, which implies nominal losses if prices fluctuate significantly.

The 10-year Chinese government bond yield has abruptly turned higher in recent days, after falling all year to a record low in early August, according to Wind Information data going back to 2010.

At around 2.2%, the Chinese 10-year yield remains far lower than the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield of nearly 4% or higher. The gap reflects how the U.S. Federal Reserve has kept interest rates high, while the People’s Bank of China has been lowering rates in the face of tepid domestic demand.

“The problem is not what it shows [about a weak economy],” Garcia-Herrero said, but “what it means for financial stability.”

“They have [Silicon Valley Bank] in mind, so what that means, corrections in sovereign bond yields having a big impact on your sovereign balance sheet,” she continued, adding that “the potential problem is worse than SVB and that’s why they’re very worried.”

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023 in one of the largest U.S. bank failures in recent times. The company’s struggles were largely blamed on shifts in capital allocation due to aggressive rate hikes by the Fed.

PBoC Governor Pan Gongsheng said in a speech in June that central banks need to learn from the Silicon Valley Bank incident, to “promptly correct and block the accumulation of financial market risks.” He called for special attention to the “maturity rate mismatch and interest rate risk of some non-bank entities holding a large number of medium and long-term bonds.” That’s according to CNBC’s translation of his Chinese.

Zerlina Zeng, head of Asia credit strategy, CreditSights, noted that the PBoC has increased intervention in the government bond market, from increased regulatory scrutiny of bond market trading to guidance for state-owned banks to sell Chinese…