Audible.com just released a new show on Bernie Madoff that explains how the world’s biggest financial scam was enabled by banks and hedge funds who were making so much money that they chose to ignore obvious red flags.
Which sounds a lot like today’s China. Here, for instance, is a sequence of events involving China Huishan Dairy Holdings, an apparently too-big-to-fail chain of dairy farms:
March 21. Huishan Dairy misses payments on some of its loans. The wife of the chairman and largest shareholder (herself an executive in charge of relationships with the company’s bankers) goes missing.
March 23. The local provincial government holds a meeting with the company and its creditor banks to propose a plan to inject liquidity into the company. This is not announced publicly.
March 24. Huishan’s shares plunge 85% in an hour, wiping out more than $4 billion of market value and leading to an indefinite trading halt.
March 28. Huishan admits to missing loan payments and misplacing the Chairman’s wife, but denies reports of faked invoices and misappropriation of funds. The local government, it promises, will buy some of the company’s excess land to bolster its balance sheet and the Chairman will sell some of his shares and invest the proceeds in the company.
Somewhere along the way, the government “ordered financial institutions involved not to downgrade the company’s credit rating or file lawsuits against it.”
As Quartz.com noted at the time:
The Chinese government can’t afford to let Huishan fail. Credit markets already deeply distrust the rust-belt Liaoning province. Authorities there were revealed to be faking economic numbers, including the province’s GDP growth, from 2011 to 2014. The province was the only province that fell into recession last year. Meanwhile local firms Dongbei Special Steel and Dalian Machine Tool went into default last year.
If Huishan does go bust, the fallout could also be disastrous for some Chinese banks. At least one of them has already felt the chill: Jiutai Bank, which is the dairy maker’s second-biggest creditor, saw the biggest one-day drop in its shares this week. According to Caixin, the small bank’s loan to Huishan currently stands at around $266 million, bigger than its estimate of impairment losses on bad loans for the whole of 2016.
The situation is not much easier for the midsize Ping An Bank, which lent nearly $300 million to Yang’s offshore entity Champ Harvest, with a 25% stake in Huishan as collateral.
And now this, from today’s Wall Street Journal:
The world’s biggest aluminum producer is in trouble, locked in a feud with its accountant over fraud allegations that have forced it to suspend trading of its shares and seek help from the central government in Beijing.
There’s a pattern here that isn’t confined to just these two companies: Cheap financing either subsidized or provided directly by government enables Chinese companies to expand beyond the limits of the global marketplace, producing a glut which makes the previously-mentioned loans unmanageable.
The companies hide their failure for a while but eventually are exposed, leading local governments to step in with new money and the central government to change the rules to prevent market participants from warning others and/or moving their capital out of the way.
As with Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the game goes on as long as new money continues to flow in and the major players continue to pretend (or are forced to pretend) that things are okay. It ends when either of those conditions changes.
Such scams don’t tend to peter out over time. Usually – like the above dairy and aluminum companies – they seem fine until one day they’re not.
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