Central bank requires new stimulus tools, analysts say

With few signs of a trough in China's economic slowdown, the central bank faces increasing pressure to dust off stimulus tools that have gone unused for more than two years.

Weakening growth has caught the People's Bank of China in the middle of a policy shift toward adopting market-based interest rates. As targeted liquidity injections have yet to arrest the slowdown, cutting banks' required reserve ratios and lending rates loom as standby measures.

"It is easier to use the traditional tools," said Liu Li-Gang, chief greater China economist in Hong Kong at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. Once the financial system is accustomed to using market-based rates to set borrowing costs, "they could shift to being a Western-style rate-targeting central bank", said Liu.

Premier Li Keqiang, who set a growth target of about 7.5 percent for this year, will meet with fellow senior Communist Party leaders next month at a gathering where he faces a credibility test given the economy's underperformance. Speculation has mounted that the meeting may address leadership of the central bank.

Pacific Investment Management Co expects China's gross domestic product growth to slow from 7.5 percent to about 6.5 percent in the next 12 months, Scott Mather, one of three newly appointed managers of the $222 billion Pimco Total Return Fund, said on its website.

Sheng Songcheng, head of the PBOC's statistics department, wrote in Economic Daily that was posted on Monday on the central government's website that an annual growth rate of 6.7 percent from 2014 to 2020 is sufficient for China to double GDP by the end of the decade from the 2010 level. The decline in some indicators is natural, Sheng wrote, as China's economy enters a "new normal".

Economists at firms including Daiwa Capital Markets and Societe Generale SA are bucking the mainstream estimate that additional targeted policy easing will be all that's needed to keep the world's growth engine humming, a Bloomberg survey showed. They see imminent cuts in banks' reserve requirements, while Barclays Plc is projecting a reduction in the benchmark lending rate by year-end.

"They are tolerating lower growth, but they still need to achieve a reasonable level of growth, I think, to also maintain social and economic stability," Chang Jian, chief China economist at Barclays in Hong Kong, said on Friday.

The PBOC last cut reserve requirements nationwide in May 2012, leaving a ratio of 20 percent for the biggest banks. A year later, the central bank removed most controls on lending rates while keeping a grip on banks' deposit rates, as PBOC Governor Zhou Xiaochuan sought to shift to what he says are two to three new tool sets to affect short-term and medium-term rates.