China

Total liabilities rose 7.3% to $36.63t.

Banks achieved 55% of their annual targets for small companies.

The growth of risk-weighted-assets continues to outpace conventional assets.

Chen has served as Bank of China’s chairman since August 2017. The world’s largest bank by assets, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has reportedly tapped Bank of China (BoC) chairman Chen Siqing as its new head, sources told Reuters. The new chairman, who headed BoC since August 2017, will have to steady ICBC’s profitability as the Chinese economy slows, threatening a spike in bad loans. In October-December, ICBC saw no quarterly profit growth for the first time since 2016. The appointment is still pending regulatory, shareholder and board approvals, said one of the sources. The last ICBC chairman, Yi Huiman, was appointed as the head of China Securities Regulatory Commission. Here’s more from Reuters.

Stricter requirements may leave just 100 surviving players out of over 1,000.

Active P2P investors also fell 45.2% to 2.3 million.

Analysts weigh that an RRR cut is still needed considering liquidity conditions.

Lenders also sharply increased provisions for future bad debt.

This represents the first quarterly decline in three years.

Shanghai- and Shenzhen-listed banks are likely to see 6.7% increase in profit.

Almost 30 banks have unveiled plans to set up WM units following clearer policies.

The energy sector saw the most defaults of $6.94b.

During the 13th National People's Congress (NPC), Chinese Premier Li Keqiang presented the government work report. Whilst the market read the new growth target (6-6.5%) rather negatively, Premier Li Keqiang was very transparent about the difficulties in reaching this target and the fiscal and monetary expansion which will be needed to achieve them. Whilst a lot has been written about tax cuts as well as lowering the still high reserve requirement ratio (RRR), less has been commented on how banks will be affected by the measures announced during the NPC. Li Keqiang made a number of specific announcements on this front. a) lower funding costs for small-and-micro enterprises (SMEs); b) 30% growth in state-owned commercial banks’ lending to SMEs from negative growth in 2018; and c) extending the maturity of loans, especially for manufacturing firms.

Banks have been allowed to issue perpetual bonds to improve solvency ratios.

Loans to SMEs by SOCBs dropped to -4% in 2018 from 12% the previous year.

Shadow banking assets fell to around 68% of GDP in 2018.