What are these people so terrified of?
Clearly the markets are not allowed to have even a normal correction before the Central Banksters leap in with more stimulus. This morning, China stepped up their game by directing their banks to “support” infrastructure projects (more empty cities and airports will fix everything!) with a new round of bond issues. The China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China have received additional funding from the State Administration for Foreign Exchange (SAFE) for the same purpose.
The Chinese Government is even showering love on the casino operators in Macau pledging to introduce more policies this year to support the city. Government support could include allowing more mainland Chinese cities to offer individual visas, and introducing multi-entry permits to make it easier for people to gamble.
To support firms, the government will expand tax breaks and tax advantages now granted small firms to larger firms as well. In addition, incentives to engage in R&D activity will be increased and broadened. The government also hopes to increase foreign trade through cuts in certain import and export duties. Unfortunately, all this is just putting a band-aid on a severed limb as the Corporate Debt situation in China is in a full-fledged melt-down:
This week, Macquarie released a must-read report titled “Further deterioration in China’s corporate debt coverage”, in which the Australian bank looks at the Chinese corporate debt bubble, not in terms of net leverage, or debt/free cash flow, but bottom-up, in terms of corporate interest coverage, or rather the inverse: the ratio of interest expense to operating profit. With good reason, Macquarie focuses on the number of companies with “uncovered debt”, or those which can’t even cover a full year of interest expense with profit.
As noted by Zero Hedge: It looks at the bond prospectuses of 780 companies and finds that there is about CNY5 trillion in total debt, mostly spread among Mining, Smelting & Material and Infrastructure companies, which belongs to companies that have a Interest/EBIT ratio > 100%, or as western credit analysts would write it, have an EBIT/Interest < 1.0x. As Macquarie notes, looking at the entire universe of CNY22 trillion in corporate debt ($3.6Tn or 30% of China's GDP), the "percentage of EBIT-uncovered debt went up from 19.9% in 2013 to 23.6% last year, and the percentage of EBITDA-uncovered debt up from 5.3% to 7%. Therefore,there has been a further deterioration in financial soundness among our sample."
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