The risk of a default chain reaction is looming over the $3.6 trillion market for wealth management products in China.
WMPs, which traditionally funneled money from Chinese individuals into assets from corporate bonds to stocks and derivatives, are now increasingly investing in each other. Such holdings may have swelled to as much as 2.6 trillion yuan ($396 billion) last year, based on estimates from Autonomous Research this month.
The trend has China watchers worried. For starters, it means that bad investments by one WMP could infect others, causing a loss of confidence in products that play an important role in bank funding. It also suggests WMPs are struggling to find enough good assets to meet their return targets. In the event of widespread losses, cross-ownership will create more uncertainty over who’s vulnerable – a key source of panic in 2008 when soured U. S. mortgage securities triggered a global financial crisis.
Those concerns have become more pressing this year after at least 10 Chinese companies defaulted on onshore bonds, the Shanghai Composite Index sank 20 percent and China’s economy showed few signs of recovery from the weakest expansion in a quarter century.
‘There’s abundant liquidity in the financial system, but a scarcity of high-yielding assets to invest in,’ said Harrison Hu, the chief Greater China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Plc in Singapore. ‘All the risks are accumulating in an overcrowded financial system.’
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on May 30, 2016.
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