IMF Says “Gaps” In China Date May Mislead–WSJ

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 12, 3:53AM EST

It has long been suspected that China officials do not accurately disclose important data about financial and economic data from the country. This may spread from PMI, to inflation, to GDP growth, to bank balance data.

The Wall Street Journal disclosed that

The International Monetary Fund’s top banking official, assessing the strength of China’s financial system, said Chinese regulators need to improve the data they use to assess whether their banks could withstand a sudden economic downturn, and also should better explain what level of capital banks need to hold.

“There are important constraints and gaps in the available data” for stress tests of China’s banks, said José Viñals, the IMF’s director of monetary and capital markets, in written responses Sunday to questions from The Wall Street Journal. “The key constraint was the lack of consistent time series of data on credit risk.”

Any data which is inadequate could cause investors in China to make poor decisions. It could also effect the view of China’s trade balance and the value of the yuan

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.