MNI China Press Digest May 17:Lower LPR, Special Bond, Housing

The following lists highlights from Chinese press reports on Tuesday:

• Benchmark Loan Prime Rates are expected to be slightly lowered on Friday, the 21st Century Business Herald reported citing Wang Yifeng, chief analyst at Everbright Securities. Though the central bank on Monday failed to cut the medium-term lending facility rate, which is an anchor to LPR, banks may add less points to form the LPR quotation this month as they enjoy lower deposit costs after the deposit interest rate reform at the weekend, and a reserve requirement ratio cut in April, the newspaper said. A cut to the MLF rate is restrained by rising prices and it could pressure the yuan and capital outflows, the newspaper added.
• China is expected to usher in a peak sales of local government special bonds between Q2 and Q3, to help boost infrastructure investment, aiming to complete the issuance of all CNY3.65 trillion special bonds by Q3, the Shanghai Securities Daily reported citing analysts. Local governments may accelerate and widen the use of special bonds to new areas such as urban gas and heating pipeline projects, the newspaper said. After the issuance of the main part of local government bonds in H1, local authorities could face certain fiscal pressure in H2 given increased anti-Covid-19 costs, which may mean higher deficits and issuing special treasury bonds, the newspaper said citing analysts.
• Chinese cities including Nanjing and Dongguan moved to relax home purchase limits on families with multiple children to buy one more home, and more cities are expected to follow suit, the China Securities Journal reported. Some cities are providing preferential mortgage rates as low as first-time buyers for these families, while some cities are subsidising such buyers as high as CNY20,000 for a single household, the newspaper said. The property market is expected to gradually pick up with major cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhou, Suzhou and Wuhan having strong market demand, the newspaper said.