MNI China Press Digest Nov 9: PBOC, Q4 Growth, Capital Opening

The following lists highlights from Chinese press reports on Tuesday:

• The PBOC's new lending tool introduced on Monday, which carries a below-market rate, was aimed at facilitating banks' lending to carbon-neutral transition and not a short-term credit stimulus, the Securities Times reported citing Zhang Xu, chief fixed-income analyst with Everbright Securities. The new tool will focus on supporting three key areas of clean energy, energy conservation, and emission-reduction technologies, with a one-year lending rate of 1.75%. Though the rate is lower than other structural tools like re-lending and rediscounting, Zhang noted it does not represent a change in the direction of monetary policy, the newspaper said. This structural tool is limited in scale and impact, the newspaper cited Zhang as saying.
• China's infrastructure investment may only provide "moderate" support to the economy in the short term, the Securities Times reported citing experts. The newly launched large projects may not translate into a substantial volume of work right away, and the overall size of the new-energy and new-infrastructure projects is relatively small, said the newspaper, one of the officially run securities dailies. Infrastructure could possibly register a noticeable rebound by H1 of 2022, the newspaper said. Q4 growth faces increasing "downward pressure" given the risk of slowing property demand and exports, making the countercyclical infrastructure building more necessary, the newspaper said. While the size of the projects started in Q4 may exceed CNY1 trillion, the impact from large projects usually takes 3-5 years to materialize, it said.
• China is devising new measures to further widen the opening of the capital market, including expanding channels for foreign investments in domestic futures, expanding the Shanghai-London Stock Connect, and making it easier for global companies to list domestically, the newspaper said. China's economic and capital market growths should attract much greater capital, the journal said. Foreign funds purchased over CNY320 billion A-shares through Stock Connect in the first 10 months of this year, near the record reached in 2019, it said.