Bloomberg terminals will be the second trading platform for Bond Connect after Tradeweb, the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing (HKEX) said on November 29.
“Allowing institutional investors to access the Mainland’s interbank bond market through Bloomberg terminals and Bond Connect will further boost international participation, contributing to the growing relevance of the nation’s bond market,” Charles Li, HKEX chief executive, said in the press release.
Bond Connect saw an average daily volume of Rmb3.6bn as of the end of October. There are 450 registered overseas institutional investors on the scheme.
*
In October 2018, the renminbi accounted for 1.70% of the total value of institutional and commercial payments, ranking sixth as an international payment currency and dropping one position from the previous month, according to the monthly report by Swift published on November 29.
The RMB was overtaken in the ranking by the Canadian dollar, whose total share of payments is 1.79%.
Overall, renminbi payments value increased by 0.12% compared to September 2018, whilst in general all payments currencies increased by 10.92%.
The report attributed the decrease to seasonal effects following the Golden Week holiday in China in October.
Hong Kong was still the dominant offshore RMB hub in October, with a 76.85% share of payments. The United Kingdom and Singapore took second and third with 5.73% and 4.31%, respectively. The United States and Taiwan, accounting for 2.41% and 2.09%, followed.
*
Despite Chinese regulators’ efforts to release liquidity and boost lending to private companies, a lot of liquidity is still trapped in the banking system.
Chinese banks are, in fact, decreasing their lending and becoming more conservative, according to data released by China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) on Monday.
Total assets in the banking system grew by 6.6% year-on-year (YoY) in October. The five big SOE banks expanded their total asset by 6.7% in October YoY, down from 7.2% in September. The 12 medium-sized joint stock banks are growing assets at 3.9%, up from 3.6% in the previous month. Meanwhile, more than 110 city-level banks, those that the government has been trying to push to lend more to the private sector, saw asset growth of 7.9% YoY, down from 8.4% in September.
*
Total revenue from SOEs in the first ten months of this year reached Rmb47tn, a 10.6% increase YoY. In the same period, total profit reached Rmb2.8tn, a 17.3% increase YoY, according to the data published by the Ministry of Finance on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, private companies are seeing their prolonged refinancing troubles lead to near bankruptcies, local media reported on Wednesday.
Ningxia Shangling Group, Dahai Group and Jinli Group are just three examples among many others, according to the report. These private companies have entered a partial bankruptcy reorganization process and many of them have credit guarantees on other private companies in the region, indicating a potentially wider fallout.