4月5日，Financial Times发布上海交通大学上海高级金融学院副院长、金融学教授朱宁的观点报道。朱宁教授指出，政府为了解决债务水平过高的问题，推动信达等资产管理公司向陷入困境的企业发放更多贷款，并计划允许银行把其在困难企业中的债权转换成股权。这些举措将令问题变得更严重。

China’s slowing brings developers down to earth

On the outskirts of one of China’s biggest industrial cities, across barren swampland, a 117-storey skyscraper rises through the dense smog.

When construction of Goldin Finance 117 is completed in the next two years, the world’s fifth-tallest building will offer tenants “a mesmerising architectural design”, with premium office space, a five-star hotel and an adjoining “mega high-end” shopping centre, all part of the only business district in the world to be built around a polo club.

“Xi’an has the Terracotta Army but Tianjin will have the Goldin tower and people will come from all over China to see it,” says a security guard at the site, where work has stopped during the bitter winter in north-eastern China.

But such lofty ambitions are being brought down to earth with a bump because of the slump in China’s property market and the slowdown in the country’s luxury goods industry, which has been hit by President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption and extravagance.

This month Goldin Properties, the Hong Kong-listed developer, and its controlling shareholder Pan Sutong, agreed a cash injection for the project from China Cinda Asset Management, one of the state-run “bad banks” with a mission to lend to distressed companies.

Cinda and Mr Pan, a polo and wine-loving billionaire, are each putting Rmb9bn ($1.4bn) into a joint venture that will acquire Goldin 117 and the shopping mall from Goldin Properties in a complex deal that will help the company repay a loan to Mr Pan and cover some of the remaining building costs.

Goldin Properties, which is 64 per cent owned by Mr Pan, says that it and he have “sufficient capital to fund the entire Tianjin project”.

A spokesman said the deal with Cinda was not driven by a cash shortage but by the desire to “partially reflect and unlock the investment value of the whole Tianjin project”, which includes other office buildings, apartments and the polo club.

Questions were asked about Mr Pan’s empire last year after shares in Goldin Properties and Goldin Financial, another Hong Kong-listed company he controls, soared, then collapsed for no clear reason, wiping $13bn off his paper fortune in a single day; events he described as mere “fairy tales”.

Analysts fear the Goldin development, which is meant to be the heart of a new commercial district half an hour from Beijing by high-speed train, is the wrong project at the wrong time.

Anne Stevenson-Yang, of China-focused research house J Capital, argues that the use of government-backed funds to support Goldin is symptomatic of the wider misallocation of capital weighing upon China’s economy.

“It’s a miniature picture of what China is all about, demonstrating scale in order to capture more financing,” says Ms Stevenson-Yang.

“China’s asset management companies and banking establishment are dedicated to maintaining the value of their collateral because if they allow it to drop and they have to mark their real estate to market, it would be a disaster for banks, depositors and cities.”

With total Chinese debt levels perilously high, having risen from about 150 per cent of gross domestic product to more than 240 per cent over the past decade, and property prices under pressure outside “tier-one” cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, Chinese banks are reluctant to continue lending to ambitious and overstretched developers.

To resolve the debt overhang, the government is pushing asset managers such as Cinda to extend more credit to troubled companies and has proposed allowing Chinese banks to swap debt in struggling enterprises for equity.

Zhu Ning, a professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, believes these moves will exacerbate problems.

“The government is using its financial arms to provide further guarantees to the real estate sector and other industries that are plagued by overcapacity,” he says. “It’s setting a bad precedent and there is a big risk of moral hazard as developers know that, in the end, the government will bail everyone out.”

Ms Stevenson-Yang believes the $10bn Goldin Tianjin project is just the latest example of the “over-the-top utopian visions that you see all over China these days”, a function of “too much money and grandiose visions driven by a small ruling elite”.

Financial statements from Goldin Properties show property sales slumping to HK$27m in the six months to September 30 from HK$479m a year earlier and the polo club and hotel losing HK$122m in the same period.

The company says Mr Pan’s strategy is to wait until the next stage is complete before selling more apartments.

Mr Pan called the Tianjin project an “art piece which I hope will be everlasting” in an interview last year at his gold-adorned office in Hong Kong.

【原文链接】China’s slowing brings developers down to earth