CH 5-y Loan Prime Rate

Chinese banks kept their benchmark lending rates unchanged for August, as profit margins come under pressure and policymakers focus on the health of financial institutions. The one-year loan prime rate will stay at 3.35% and the five-year rate, a reference for long-term credit including mortgages, remains at 3.85%, according to a Tuesday statement from the People’s Bank of China. The moves were in line with the forecasts of all economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The decisions reflect a balancing act by China, after PBOC Governor Pan ...

Copper experienced a strong rout last week with market participants blaming the soft Chinese economic data and the increase in inventories in most global warehouses suggesting some weak demand. The PBoC tonight surprised with rate cuts across many key benchmarks. Moreover, the recent PBoC policy framework reform suggests that the Chinese officials could take more actions to spur growth. In the big picture, stable global growth and major central banks cutting rates into resilient economies should be bullish drivers for the copper ...

The People’s Bank of China cut a key short-term policy rate for the first time in almost a year, stepping up support for the economy after growth disappointed and steering a shift toward a new policy benchmark. The seven-day reverse repo rate is lowered by 10 basis points to 1.7%, the PBOC said in a statement Monday. This aims to optimize the open market operation mechanism and increase financial support for the economy, it added. Chinese banks followed the move about an hour later by lowering their main benchmark lending rates, or ...

China's one-year loan prime rate (LPR), a market-based benchmark lending rate, was 3.45 percent on Wednesday, unchanged from the previous month. The over-five-year LPR, on which many lenders base their mortgage rates, also held steady from the previous reading of 3.95 percent, according to the National Interbank Funding Center. Last month, China cut the over-five-year rate by 25 basis points to 3.95 percent, the largest drop in recent years. The one-year rate remained unchanged in February. A lower LPR is expected to shore up the ...

Constrained on all sides, China’s central bank is aiming to squeeze more value out of its policy actions by catching markets unaware with surprise easing aimed at putting a floor under the struggling economy. A record cut to a key lending rate earlier this week announced by the People’s Bank of China was just the latest unexpected move since Governor Pan Gongsheng took office last summer. At a press briefing last month, he shocked with an outsized cut to banks’ reserve requirement ratio. The moves reflect the PBOC’s effort to step up ...