Securities Times reporter Li Yingchao
Recently, commercial banks including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Merchants Bank and other commercial banks have seen the phenomenon that the three-year deposit rate is almost the same as the five-year deposit rate, and some bank deposit rates even appear "inverted".
For example, China Construction Bank’s 3-year and 5-year time deposit rates are both 2.75%, and the 3-year time deposit can rise to 3.15% when it reaches RMB 50,000; The maximum interest rate for fixed deposits is 2.75%.
Generally speaking, banks obtain benefits through the business method of "borrowing short and releasing long", and the premium on the deposit term is also the cost that the bank pays to ensure the term conversion function.
Therefore, banks with stronger liquidity management capabilities are usually willing to bear smaller deposit term premiums.
Why did the medium and long-term deposit interest rate "invert" this time?
The main reason is that banks believe that funds will continue to be loose in the future, and the cost of raising funds through rolling financing is significantly lower than that of long-term time deposits with locked interest rates.
In addition to the current monetary easing, sufficient short-term liquidity and other factors, the bank level is more based on the consideration of assets and liabilities and net interest margins, in order to "reduce costs".
The "inversion" of medium and long-term deposit interest rates also shows from one aspect that the market-oriented reform of my country's deposit interest rates has achieved results, and the autonomy of bank deposit pricing has been significantly improved.
The state delegates power to banks. Within the scope of the policy, commercial banks, based on reference to the central bank’s benchmark deposit interest rate, will reasonably price deposits based on factors such as market capital supply and demand and their own asset-liability structure, so as to improve the efficiency of market resource allocation.
Many bank executives once said at the performance conference held in the first quarter that the competition on the debt side is fierce, and the cost of deposits is still showing a rigid trend.
But at present, the negative impact caused by the epidemic in individual regions in the first quarter is emerging, and banks have therefore accelerated the pace of adjusting their debt-side strategies.
Since the beginning of this year, affected by multiple factors such as repeated epidemics and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the social responsibility of the banking industry to benefit the real economy has become more prominent, and the net interest margin has continued to be under pressure.
In the first half of the year, LPR fell faster than the market expected, and the supervision led to the decline of deposit interest rates many times, which not only freed up space for banks to reduce the financing cost of the real economy, but also improved the pressure of deposit competition to a certain extent. some support.
However, it should be noted that the differences between different banks are quite large.
Although the market expects that the money supply is relatively abundant, the behavior of some banks to raise deposit interest rates to attract savings still exists.
In the face of real-time changes in deposit interest rates, depositors not only need to consider the bank's deposit interest rate based on the yield, but also need to consider their own actual situation to make flexible capital allocation.