作者：2010年7月8日经济学人
在过去的十年里，西方的金融资本正在衰落，而中国的银行业却借助改革而迅速崛起。当北美和欧洲的银行正在忙于制造泡沫的时候，中国的银行正在进行改革，从受坏账困扰的蹩脚官僚主义转变成具有世界影响力。
这种转变的完成，以五大国有银行之一的中国农行最后上市作为完成的标志。即便按照中国的标准，中国农行也是一个巨无霸：拥有3.2亿储户，44.1万员工以及比华尔街许多公司里的桌子还要多的支行网点。在全球市值最高的十大银行中，中国占了四席，而在2004年时前十名根本没还中国的份。相比中国的银行，著名的德意志银行和巴克莱银行简直就是小儿科。人们开始担心，国家控制的金融是不是正在超越自由的金融制度。实际上这是一种误解。
不管黑猫白猫，抓到老鼠的就是好猫
尽管排名时常会产生误导，然而中国国有银行的基础比上世纪八十年代的日本要坚实的多。中国国有银行有巨大的金融潜力——不到1%的农行储户有抵押贷款。国有银行有很强的危机应对能力，大部分是因为这些银行并没有完全离开政府的帮助。因此，尽管这些银行能挣钱，也具有上市公司的特征，但国家是最大的股东，银行高管层是由共产党任命，这些高管的收入仅仅是西方同行们的零头。行长是银行总裁的同时也是共产党的高级官员，他们具有超越市场的更多职权。西方的监管者很少会直接干涉银行，而中国银行业的监管者严格控制着银行，例如制定信贷规模和存款准备金率等。金融系统非常封闭。一些外资银行持有少量国有银行股份。外资银行在大陆的利润仅占市场份额的1%，同时，国有银行只有4%的利润来自海外。
中国的国资银行成为了爱国的榜样。经济危机时，发达国家试图通过央行向银行发放贷款来刺激经济，但银行却把这些流动资金储存了起来。在1999年亚洲金融危机之后，中国政府跳过中间环节，直接要求银行提供更多信贷。2008年信贷规模是GDP的1.02倍，到了2009年这一数字迅速扩大到1.27倍，从乡村高速公路到上海浦东的房地产，各行各业都在投资。持续有力的增长为中国带来了称赞。在印度和巴西，人们已经相信国家控制的银行可以帮助抵消经济周期带来的影响。甚至在私有银行众多的发达国家，监管层正在审视中国控制信贷的方法。曾经被认为是过度控制的监管，现在已经重新打上了“宏观监管”的标签。
即便是赞赏者，也无法回避中国的坏账问题。那些认为自由资本主义必定会产生坏账的人可以参考清朝的情形。在几十年的管理不善后，上世纪90年代末，体制僵化的国有企业间形成了三角债。为了消除这些债务，中国开始了前所未有的金融救助。从1998年起，仅五大国有银行就获得了相当于4200亿美元的注资，这一数字超过了美国此前的金融刺激计划。国有银行改革的目的就是为了避免类似事件再发生。
信贷规模的大幅增长引起了担忧。许多人担心政府大规模的投资基础设施建设、房地产经济和抵押贷款会形成资产泡沫。中国的银行家对此并不担心，但是许多投资者仍然警惕着关注着官员腐败、荒无人烟的公路和废弃的商业地产。
尽管潜在的危机很大，这些坏账不会影响北京扶持的国有银行。即便是大部分贷款无法收回，中国的银行系统也有能力吸收不良贷款的冲击。其中有相当一部分应归功于银行监管机构——按计划，今年的信贷规模将提高八分之一。但主要的原因还是因为中国的高储蓄率。以大量的过度储蓄为后盾，银行无需通过不稳定的信贷市场来筹措资金。这使得银行有足够的时间，通过高额的贷款利息充实资本，从而解决坏账问题。同时，持有大量外汇和少量债务的中国政府也是银行的强有力后盾。
中国特色越来越不明显的资本化
实际上，只有一种可能会影响国有银行的成功。如果中国不打算通过调控来控制信贷暴增，重新平衡国民经济和投资并且促进消费，银行将需要调整其资产负债表，并向个人和小型公司发放贷款。金融成本的上升将导致国有企业向债券市场融资。当客户的资金渠道更为丰富将导致银行的贷款利润被挤压，迫使它们进入保险等行业，开始多元化经营。相对于贷款，由于存款利率降低，人们将会寻找投资收益更高的股票和债券，从而使银行的存款规模将降低。
尽管被国家控制，国有银行最终还是可能变成和其他地方一样的商业银行。但即便是这种改变会逐步发生，在当前经济快速增长下，国有银行每隔几年仍需资金注入。政府可能对不断地注资感到疲惫——今年政府提高在国资银行所占的股份已经引起了不满，宁肯持股比例被稀释。同时，即便国有银行市值名列世界前列，在政府干预下的海外大额投资非常困难。中国国有银行的崛起既令人惊叹，又让人感到恐慌。它们不是市场经济的终结者，而是处在市场化的过程中。
China's banks
Great Wall Street
The rise of China’s state-backed banks is stunning. But success will force the model to change
Jul 8th 2010
THERE is no more potent symbol of the relative decline of Western finance than the revolution in Chinese banking over the past decade. While American and European banks have been busy blowing up, China's have been transformed from communist bureaucracies crippled by bad debts into something resembling world beaters.
That metamorphosis has been completed by the flotation of Agricultural Bank of China, the last of the five big state-owned banks to list (see article). Even by Chinese standards it is colossal, with 320m customers, 441,000 staff and more branches than many Wall Street firms have desks. Four of the world's ten biggest banks by market value are now Chinese. In 2004 none was. Better-known (and more global) lenders such as Deutsche Bank and Barclays look rather puny by comparison. It's natural to wonder if more than just firms are being eclipsed: whether a freewheeling era is being superseded by a “Beijing consensus” of state-managed finance. Though neat, such a conclusion looks wrongheaded.
Whatever their colour, these cats catch mice
As all bankers know, league tables can mislead. Still, China's rise is more solid than that of Japan's banks in the 1980s. Finance has huge potential in China—less than 1% of AgBank's retail customers have mortgages. And the country's banks had a good crisis, largely because they never entirely left the government's embrace. So although they make money and have the trappings of public companies, the state owns a majority stake and the Communist Party appoints the top brass, whose pay is a fraction of that of their Western peers. Those bosses, with their dual role as party bigwigs and chief executives, are beholden to a higher authority than the stockmarket. Their regulators, meanwhile, wield supposedly crude tools to control banks, such as lending caps and reserve ratios, long dismissed by “light touch” supervisors elsewhere. And the system is pretty closed. Some foreign banks have minority stakes in Chinese firms. But foreigners' own operations on the mainland have a market share of less than 1% by profits, while Chinese banks make less than 4% of their profits abroad.
This patriotic model has done well. Rich countries tried to kick-start their economies by getting central banks to lend to banks, which, frustratingly, have hoarded the liquidity. As in 1999 after the Asian crisis, China's politicians just cut out the middleman and told the banks to supply more credit. Loans grew spectacularly, from 102% of GDP in 2008 to 127% in 2009, funding everything from motorways through paddy fields to yuppie flats in Pudong. Growth stayed strong and China won many admirers. In India and Brazil it is no longer retrograde to argue that state-controlled banks should help counteract the economic cycle. Even in rich countries with privately owned banks, supervisors are eyeing the tools used by China's regulators to control credit. Communist Party diktat has been relabelled as “macroprudential supervision”.
Even admirers, though, cannot fail to spot China's bad-debt problem. Those who think capitalist democracies have an unrivalled talent for generating dud loans should consider the Middle Kingdom. After decades of mismanagement, by the late 1990s perhaps a third of all loans were sour, most of them owed by zombie state-owned enterprises. Cleaning that up left China a world leader in bail-outs. Since 1998 it has injected the equivalent of $420 billion into the biggest five banks alone, more than the outlays of America's TARP bail-out fund. China's reforms were meant to stop this ever happening again.
A repeat performance is exactly what some fear after the latest binge. Most worrying are loans to infrastructure projects sponsored by local governments (perhaps a sixth of outstanding loans) and, given a frothy property market, real-estate financing and mortgages (a fifth of the total, with some overlap with infrastructure loans). China's bankers say they are relaxed but some investors are kept awake by visions of corrupt officials, roads to nowhere and deserted shopping malls.
Although potentially severe, these bad debts will not be the downfall of the Beijing model of banking. Even if a chunk of the loans is written off, the system can absorb the hit. That is partly thanks to an impressive regulator, which has prodded the banks to raise capital this year—by about an eighth, if all goes to plan. But it is mainly because of China's high savings rate. With piles of excess deposits banks do not rely on fickle debt markets for funding. That buys them time to earn their way out of a bad-debt problem, using their high lending profits to replenish capital. As a backstop, China's government, with little debt and large foreign reserves, has deep pockets.
Indeed, there is only one thing that will guarantee the demise of China's present model of banking: success. If China manages to digest its recent lending boom without a slump and then rebalance its economy away from investment and towards consumption, banks will need to free up space on their balance-sheets for lending to individuals and small firms. The heavy lifting of financing infrastructure and state companies will shift to bond markets. As customers have more sources of finance, banks' lending profits will be squeezed, forcing them to diversify into capital-market activities like underwriting. Banks' buffers of deposits should also shrink, relative to loans, as the savings rate falls and as people move cash into higher-return shares and bonds (earning banks fees in the process).
China's banks could then end up looking a lot like banks elsewhere, although the state will still have control. Yet even that could change gradually. At current growth rates China's banks will need capital injections every few years. The government may tire of these shakedowns—its participation in this year's equity raisings has been a little grudging—and allow its stake to be diluted instead. And, as China's banks claim their rightful place among the global leaders, they will find doing big foreign deals is hard when the government has a hand on the steering wheel. The rise of China's banks is stunning and a little frightening. Yet they are not the pallbearers of market-based finance, just a work in progress.
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