China’s highly leveraged state-owned corporates

Morgan Stanley’s Viktor Hjort, Nishant Sood, and Gaurav Singhal show that financial leverage of China’s corporates has reached record highs, particularly for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Increased debt financing reflects easy credit conditions and has partly served to cover funding gaps. In case of an economic downturn, consequences for credit quality would probably be more severe now than back in 2009.