By Fan Jianjun, General Office, DRC

Research Report No 163, 2015 (Total 4848)

Abstract:

The system of "raising and lowering interest rates" in the sense of monetary policies especially refers to the fact that the central bank makes adjustments based on equilibrium borrowing and lending prices of inter-bank market monetary base, rather than on benchmark interest rates for savings and loans. In terms of the trend of the weighted average Shanghai interbank offered rate between January to September 2015, China's current monetary policy operations are generally in a state of disorder. This is mainly because China's broad money M2 and inflation index CPI have major flaws in statistics designing. The former incorporates a large number of non-monetary time deposits and the latter are unfit for measuring China's inflation level, both "misleading" current monetary policy operations of the central bank. It is suggested that the central bank make major adjustments on China's monetary policy macro-control framework, especially the system of "raising and lowering interest rates": abandon the M2 growth rate target, adopt instead Shanghai interbank overnight lending rate or overnight repurchase rate as China's monetary policy intermediate targets, and make the latter China's market benchmark interest rates, so as to adjust operations of "raising and lowering interest rates" from centering around benchmark interest rates for savings and loans in the past to centering around overnight lending rate or overnight repo rate.