Financial Shocks, Deleveraging and Macroeconomic Fluctuations in China

Abstract To deleverage is one of the major tasks for the supply-side structural reform in China, and to steadily deleverage in order is the key to fending off and defusing financial risks. This paper uses the economic statistics of China around 2016 to depict the “expansion–contraction” fluctuations with Chinese macroeconomy during the deleveraging. In this realistic context, it constructs a financial business cycle model based on the financial accelerator theory and attempts to use default cost changes to introduce financial shocks and understand China’s macroeconomic fluctuations in the deleveraging context in the perspective of unanticipated and anticipated shocks. Results of the numerical model simulation show that before and after the deleveraging, the fluctuations of credit, leverage ratio, credit spread and other major macroeconomic variables originate not only from the changes with unanticipated default cost. Anticipated changes with default cost can similarly explain the “expansion–contraction” macroeconomic fluctuations in recent years and offer a new perspective into the fluctuations during deleveraging. Accordingly, government, when practicing deleveraging policies, is advised to take into full consideration not only the actual changes with default cost, but also anticipated factors of financial institutions.