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China’s property market has still not found a bottom despite all the turmoil in the past year, according to Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters.
Speaking to CNBC’s JP Ong, Winters described the investing environment in China as “difficult,” explaining that consumer confidence and international investor confidence was relatively low.
“We know that the underlying source of a lot of the confidence questions is the property market, and the property market has not yet completely bottomed out, so it’s been a slow grind down,” he added.
Winters pointed out, “there are some signs from time to time that we’re seeing an increase in activity, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel like we’ve really found a true bottom in terms of price.”
The danger, he said, is that a property market bubble that bursts in other markets has usually portended a financial crisis, and that is normally accompanied with more significant falls in GDP.
China posted 4.7% growth in the second quarter from a year ago, down from 5.3% in the first quarter and its lowest since the first quarter of 2023.
Last week, Bank of America cut its GDP growth forecast for China to 4.8% for 2024 from 5% earlier, and also trimmed its forecasts to 4.5% for both 2025 and 2026, down from 4.7%.
Beijing has made several moves to try to stimulate the economy, including cutting loan rates and most recently, allowing homebuyers to refinance their home loans so as to free up money for consumption.
Winters explained that the reason China has not launched a massive stimulus program is because the country saw what other countries did during the first wave of Covid, which saddled economies with sharply higher debt levels.
“I think we’re seeing these continuous, small stimulus programs, monetary and fiscal policy, driven to make sure that we don’t get into really a bad spiral that it would be difficult to recover from… Our expectation is that the stimulus will be enough, but not excessive,” he said.
As such, he thinks that it will be a bit uncomfortable in the short term, but fiscally, “that’s going to be a good thing.”
Separately, Hao Hong, partner and chief economist at GROW Investment Group told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” there are no signs of strong policy stimulus just yet.
While he said that “we can only guess” as to the reason why Beijing has not unleashed any massive stimulus, he thinks that China is holding back from major policy stimulus because of structural and circular downward pricing pressure that it is encountering in the property sector.