China's financial regulator has called on banks to further compress their loans in order to meet the year's credit-growth goal, the Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday.

The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) convened a meeting yesterday with State-owned commercial banks, and put brakes on credit growth.

According to the central bank's statistics on monetary credit released yesterday, the October growth of renminbi loans from China's financial institutions slowed to 136.1 billion yuan (US$18.32 billion), the lowest monthly increase this year.

However, the loan increase in the first ten months totaled 26.03 trillion yuan, up 17.66 percent year-on-year.

CBRC chairman Liu Mingkang vowed earlier to bring the whole-year credit growth below 15 percent. To meet the goal, commercial banks have been given only 85 billion yuan for lending in the rest of the year.

The paper quoted an industry insider as saying although commercial banks' credit policy tends to be tight at year-end, the 15-percent goal is still hard to achieve.

The source anticipated financial regulators to impose more credit tightening measures or give specific instruction to the banks, as well as convene similar credit meetings to improve loan control.

Either way, with the central bank's ninth hike of banks' reserve requirement ratio this year, more liquidity pressure will force commercial banks to slow the pace of lending, the source said.

(China Daily November 15, 2007)