金融英语阅读辅导资料：CBRC clarifies Liu’s comments
The China Banking Regulatory Commission released a statement late Sunday clarifying comments made by its governor, Liu Mingkang, at the annual Boao Forum for Asia.The CBRC said some commercial banks in Beijing had, of their own accord, set rules stipulating that buyers of second houses had to make a down payment equal to 60 percent of the value of the properties they intended to purchase, in order to control lending risks.
The statement came after Liu was widely quoted Sunday by sources including the China News Agency and the Sina web portal as saying that "buyers of second homes in cities including Beijing and Shanghai should have to come up with down payments totaling at least 60 percent of the value of the property they intend to buy."
Speculators have swarmed the property markets in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, with some owning dozens of units, Liu said.
"Relatively speaking, it is much safer for banks to grant credit to buyers of first houses," he said.
Liu said banks in Beijing had already started requiring the larger down payment for buyers of second homes.
It was unclear whether or not Liu’s comments indicated any potential property policy changes by the CBRC.
Calls Sunday to China’s four major banks, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Bank of China, did not receive replies in time for inclusion in this story.
"In Beijing, to a certain extent, the soaring home prices were driven up by the speculators, and consequently the CBRC released guidelines to hedge financial risks," Xu Chao, a research manager at Beijing Centaline Property Consultants Co., told the Global Times Sunday.
"But I still have not gotten word from commercial banks about the 60 percent down payment, and in my experience, it always takes a certain period of time for banks if they really want to put regulations into practice," he said.
The CBRC reiterated last July that those looking to buy second houses had to make down payments of no less than 40 percent of the total value of the properties, with the interest rate 1.1 times China’s benchmark interest rate.
The policy first went into effect in 2007.中华考试网
Centaline China Property Research’s own existing home price index for Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Guangzhou increased 2 percent in March over the previous month, according to data released by the research institute over the weekend.
In Shanghai, the average price of new housing reached 19,767 yuan ($2,897) per square meter, a 48 percent increase year-on-year and a rise of 0.37 percent over the previous month, according to data compiled by the YouWin Real Estate Research Center (Shanghai).
"Once the 60 percent down payment policies are strictly put into practice in Beijing, speculators’ enthusiasm will be suppressed, and the over-heated real estate market could be cooled," said Yin Bocheng, director of the real estate research center of Fudan University in Shanghai.
Yin said buyers looking to acquire additional properties should be required to pay 100 percent of the value of the properties up front.
Since the government has prohibited stimulus loans from being used for stock market speculation, such speculation should also be banned in the real estate market, he said.
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