State Bank official optimistic about credit market in 2014 One official from the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) said in a recent interview that banks are applying better lending policies and credit will grow around 14% this year. Nguyen Thi Hong, Director of the SBV’s Monetary Policy Department said liquidity in the banking system in 2014 has improved.   Nguyen Thi Hong, Director of the SBV’s Monetary Policy Department Some are still worried that difficulties lagged from last year may continue to hinder marco-economic stability and negatively impact monetary policies for this year. What are your comments about this? Even though the government may be not able to fully deal with all remained difficulties in regulating macro-economy, recent developments in the first two months of this year have shown positive signals. There have been some positive forecasts on the world economic environment, which is expected to benefit Vietnam, especially the country’s exports. The country’s economic indicators have seen several positive signals over the past two months with the construction industry growing 5.4% compared to a year earlier and 1.4% against late last year. The country’s retail sales during the first two months of this year increased by 6.2% compared to the same period last year. Disbursements of foreign directed investment have been up 6.7% and Purchasing Managers' Indexes (PMI) have reached 52.1 scores, proving consecutive increase over the past five months. Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by only 1.24% in the first two months of this year compared to late last year with an increase of only 0.66% for January and 0.55% for February, which are rather low compared to the previous years. While the banking system often suffers from modest liquidity before and after the Tet holiday, this year’s situation is much more stable. Recently, some banks have offered lending policies with low interest rates but many enterprises claim that lending has yet to meet the demand and lending interest rates are still rather high. What do you think about this? This year the SBV has prioritised the effort to help further lower interest rates for production and trading sectors. We’re still maintaining interest rate in the banking system as well as short-term lending interest rates for five sectors of preferences. The SBV has also been urging financial institutions to lower their lending interest rates, including for signed lending contracts, to around 13% per year as well as further cut interest rates for the VND30-trillion real estate package by 1% per year. All of these efforts are expected to help stabilise the market and further pull down the interest rates. After the Tet holiday, several banks have lowered their interest rates for short-term deposits by between 0.3% and 0.5% per year as well as by 0.1% per year for long-term deposits. This is considered to have set a foundation for them to lower their lending interest rates and attract long-term deposits. In general, lending interest rates both in VND and USD have been rather stable and reasonable. Several banks have even applied lending interest rate at less than 6% per year, which is lower than the deposit interest rate. SBV governor said at the government’s regular meeting on February 28 that credit growth rate over the past two months was 1.66% lower compared to the rate by late last year. How will the SBV do to ensure a suitable credit growth rate for this year? Credit in the banking system fell 1.66% as of February 20 compared to late last year due to a decrease of 1.94% in credit in VND. Such situation is suitable for developments in the first two months of the previous years that credit often fell as a result of the Tet holiday. This is a real challenge and the SBV will try to ensure credit growth rate at around 12% to 14% for this year. As planned, the SBV should have dealt with eight out of nine incompetent banks and allowed wholly foreign ownership in one remaining weak bank. Why hasn’t the SBV made an official announcement about this? The SBV is urging these incompetent banks to speed up the implementation of their approved restructuring plans. The bank is however still considering the proposal to allow wholly foreign ownership at one incompetent bank as such plan must be approved by the Prime Minister in accordance with the current regulations. VnEconomy