|
Deposit interest rates down, lending interest rates stay put
As per the request by the State Bank of Vietnam, commercial banks have to mobilize capital at the interest rates no higher than 14 percent per annum. However, the lending interest rates still have been kept sky high at over 20 percent.
“With the lending interest rate of over 20 percent, the profits we can make are just big enough to pay bank loan interests,” Director of an enterprise in Dong Nai province complained, saying that the State Bank has failed to force the lending interest rate down.
Businesses keep moaning about high interest rates
In principle, the lending interest rates just need to be higher by 2-2.5 percent to bring profits to banks. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, banks have been mobilizing capital at 14 percent per annum for the last many months, but still have been lending at 20 percent per annum, which means the gap between the input and output interest rates reaching 6 percent.
Some bankers say that the last months of the year are the time when individual, institutional and businesses need money to do business, or to pay salaries to laborers. Therefore, some banks decide to keep high lending interest rates to restrict the lending demand and gather capital to satisfy the customers’ demand for withdrawing money.
Even big banks have also been tightly controlling the credit by maintaining high lending interest rates applied to the borrowers who are not priority clients. Instead of pushing up lending to clients, the big banks which have profuse capital, and have shifted to lend to other banks in the interbank market at high interest rates.
Analysts have commented that commercial banks have not eased the lending interest rates, partially because they are still listening for the news about the interest rate policy.
People are whispering in each other’s ears that four big commercial banks have reached an agreement on providing loans at the interest rates of no higher than 18 percent per annum.
For the time being, in order to maintain their operation, businesses still have to borrow capital for working capital which will be used to buy materials for production and goods for the year-end sale season, accepting high interest rates.
Businesses keep complaining that the prolonged high interest rates have become unbearable for them. The slow sales and big stocks in the context of the overly high lending interest rates have pushed thousands of businesses to the verge of bankruptcy.
Experts have also called on to reduce the lending interest rates immediately in order to facilitate businesses’ operation and protect the banking system from bad debts.
Banks have no more reasons to keep interest rates high
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung emphasized at the conference on implementing banking system’s tasks in 2012, that easing the lending interest rates is the key duty of the year.
Nguyen Van Thuan, Dean of the Finance & Banking Faculty of the HCM City Open University, also said that the capital costs have decreased; therefore, banks now have no more reasons to keep lending interest rates high, emphasizing that the 1-2 percent interest rate is within banks’ reach.
In fact, in September 2011, when banks began applying the 14 percent ceiling deposit interest rate policy, banks said that they needed 1-3 months more to gradually ease the lending interest rates to 17-19 percent per annum, because they had to pay high for deposits before.
However, commercial banks have broken their promises--until now, the lending interest rates still have been kept at high levels
Some analysts have pointed out that the key problem lies in the interbank market. Some small banks which regularly lack capital have to borrow capital from other banks at high interest rates. Therefore, banks don’t think that they need to ease interest rates at this moment.
Therefore, the analysts believe that the State Bank needs to apply necessary measures to pump capital to the interbank market. When the market gets stabilized, and the demand decreases significantly, big banks would have to think of lowering the interest rates.
vietnamnet
|
