China Insight: Bond Inflows Pick Up Amid Weak Economy

As Emerging Markets go into recession, EM policymakers have rapidly deployed a broad range of support measures with more to come, but it remains to be seen how effective these will be in mitigating the EM growth hit. As far as China is concerned, negative GDP growth in Q1 looks unavoidable. The most pessimistic estimate in the street is -9%. For the full-year GDP growth, the revised estimates in the street fall between +1% and +4%. In light of the gloomy economic outlook, Beijing definitely will step up stimulus. Now a cut in the benchmark deposit rate is on the cards, which could be a more meaningful means to boost retail consumption.

With interest rates trending downward, onshore government bonds and policy bank bonds have kept rallying recently on the back of strong buy-and-hold demand (chart 1). The latest data suggests the China bond market saw USD11bn of net inflows from foreign investors in February, up from only USD2bn in January (chart 2). Among the paper which is already or being included in the major global government bond indices, policy bank bonds (PBBs) registered a bigger increase in foreign investors' portfolios than China Government Bonds (CGBs). Of the USD11bn of net inflows in February, USD5bn was taken by PBBs, USD4bn by CGBs with the remainder by negotiable certificates of deposit (NCDs) and medium-term notes (MTNs).

Meanwhile, as per www.chnfund.com (a major website about the fund management industry in China), the regulators will change the approval mechanism for 2nd-tier bond funds which are eligible for investing mainly in bonds and a bit in A-shares. The change will speed up the approval process. Given the outlook of A-shares continues to be sluggish, such a change will encourage more fund management firms to set up 2nd-tier bond funds (chart 3), in turn providing extra support to bond market sentiment.

For more insight subscribe here.