Rise and Fall of the First Financial Futures Market in China: The Case of Chinese Government Bond Futures

This paper studies the rise and fall of the first financial futures market in China. We compare the characteristics in the Chinese Government bond futures market with those in the US T-bond futures market. They differ in market design and structure, market governance, margin requirements, position limits, delivery process, and the way in which the settlement price is calculated. Furthermore, with a unique dataset, we show that prior to maturities of government bond futures, traders began to accumulate significant amounts of long positions for several selected contracts without the intention to offset, forcing short position holders to either purchase deliverable bonds or offset futures at highly inflated prices, causing higher market volatility and price disequilibrium in both spot and futures markets. Arbitrage opportunity arises and the market eventually collapses. The lessons learned from the suspension of the Chinese Government bond futures market offer an invaluable learning experience.

Transforming Central Bank Liabilities into Government Debt： The Case of China

Where policy has substantially increased central bank assets, the corresponding liabilities present an opportunity to increase the breadth, depth and liquidity of the government bond market. In China＇s case, transformed illiquid central bank liabilities couM double or triple the stock of government bonds. Central bank liabilities can be transformed into government bonds either through the government ＂s purchase of foreign exchange reserves held by the central bank or by the government overfunding its borrowing requirement and depositing the proceeds in the central bank. The overfunding approach is preferred if, for financial stability reasons, it is judged prudent to leave the central bank with sufficient resources to serve itself as lender of last resort in foreign currency to the banking system. In the case of China, public debt consolidation could also contribute to further liberalizing the Chinese banking system, wider international use of the renminbi and more balanced holdings of key currency government bonds.

Liquidity of China’s government bond market: Measures and driving forces

We construct a daily liquidity index of China’s government bond market using transaction data from the national interbank market during 2001–2020.The index is a composite of popular price-based and quantity-based metrics of liquidity.The composite indices,ob-tained by averaging across different metrics and by applying the principal component analysis,respectively,both point to a better liquidity condition after 2010.Market liquidity swings appear to be highly correlated with domestic funding liquidity and financial mar-ket volatility,but display fewer correlations with global macrofinan-cial indicators.Our findings suggest that the further deepening of the government bond market would support domestic financial stability and monetary operations down the road.

Analysis of the Pull Effect of Local Government Special-Purpose Bond Investment on Economic Growth Under the Input-Output Framework

In this paper,we discuss the development process of local government special bonds,and the role channels of local government special debt investment in driving China’s economic growth.Based on the specific decomposition of Xinjiang local government special bond investment,this paper uses the non-competitive input-output model for the first time to analyze the net pulling effect of Xinjiang local government special bond investment on Xinjiang’s GDP and employment in 2020.Two measure calibers are set in this paper based on whether the financing costs are considered or not;in addition,we set up four scenarios based on two conditions:Whether to consider retained fun and whether to consider using special-purpose bond investment to leverage social capital.The results show that:1)when financing costs are not considered,the RMB77.4 billion local government special-purpose bonds can push the GDP of Xinjiang to grow by RMB42.27 billion,RMB35.12 billion,RMB77.548billion and RMB69.34 billion respectively under the four scenarios;2)when financing costs are not considered,the number of jobs driven by the RMB77.4 billion local government special-purpose bonds was respectively 372,300,324,500,718,500 and 601,300 in the four scenarios;3)when financing costs are considered,the RMB77.4 billion local government special-purpose bonds can push the GDP of Xinjiang to grow by RMB71.876 billion and RMB64.268 billion under scenario 3)and scenario 4).