China’s finally getting serious about stimulating its dismal economy.
On Tuesday, three of its top financial regulators appeared side by side in a rare press conference on the economy where People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng announced a broad range of monetary stimulus measures.
They include cutting a short-term key interest rate and reducing reserve requirement ratio, or RRR, to the lowest level since at least 2018. The RRR refers to the amount of money banks need to hold in reserve.
Pan also announced 800 billion Chinese yuan, or $114 billion, in liquidity support. He said authorities are looking into a stock stabilization fund.
Analysts say the measures are aggressive and even historic.
“Today’s policy measures are bold by historical standards,” Betty Wang, the lead economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note on Tuesday.
“This is the first time since the pandemic that the central bank offered a combination of rate cuts, RRR cuts, and structural monetary policies at the same time,” she added.
Wang said China’s central bank pulled …