Aussie Dollar Tanks After China Admits Growth Will Miss 6.5% Target

With fears mounting over China’s debt load sustainability, and amid yet another liquidity crisis, President Xi Jinping appeared to admit that China’s economic growth will slow below the government’s 6.5% target. Despite the promise of creating a “modestly prosperous society,” Xi warned that China doesn’t need to meet the objective if doing so creates too much risk – a little late for that after trillions of freshly created credit was spewed into zombified firms this year – but at least reality is starting to set in.
Last year’s 6.9 percent expansion was the slowest in a quarter century. For this year, the government set a 6.5 percent to 7 percent target range, slower than last year’s goal of about 7 percent. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said earlier in February that the fund strongly recommended that China set a growth target range of 6 percent to 6.5 percent.
As Bloomberg reports, too much emphasis on meeting growth objectives is increasing financial risk, according to Huang Yiping, an adviser to the People’s Bank of China. The higher the short-term growth target, the more difficult it will be to rebalance the economy to favor long-term growth, Huang, an economics professor at Peking University, said at an event this week in Beijing.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 23, 2016.