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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (56080)	11/17/2004 6:12:35 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

>>Here at my university, the network is at a crawl. Port monitoring is a fright. Literally hundreds of port scans every hour, looking for unsecured machines, of which there are so very very many.<< What is the big deal? My computer at home in the US also get scanned by hundreds, literaly, every hour.

To: RealMuLan who wrote (56080)	11/18/2004 2:40:19 AM
From: Taikun	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Soaring defaults hit car loans Olivia Chung Faced with soaring default rates, China's commercial banks have launched a joint effort to collect bad debts that could account for more than half the car loans they made as China's vehicle market took off. The Big Four state banks - the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China - accounted for 81 per cent of the soured loans, which at the beginning of this year stood at about 100 billion yuan (HK$93.98 billion), more than half the 180 billion yuan in such loans then outstanding, according to People's Bank of China figures. Though total outstanding car loans have fallen since Beijing began cracking down on such lending this spring, the proportion that is non-performing has remained stubbornly high. The banks are in this mess because they lack adequate credit controls, said an official with the Huicheng Sales Company, a unit of car dealer chain Zhongyida Group. As the banks have focused on collecting their bad debts under pressure from the China Banking Regulatory Commission they have clamped down on new car loans, adding to the downward spiral in car sales that began last May. ``The banks usually have to clear up loans that are not being repaid between now and the end of the year, so it is very hard for people to get car loans,'' the official said. An official with the loan department of one of the Big Four state-owned banks in Beijing said banks have reined in car loans to try to cut their risk. As of September 30, outstanding loans totalled 160 billion yuan, down 23.3 billion yuan. Car sales, after reviving in September, fell 7.99 per cent in October from a month earlier to 178,600 units, Reuters said, citing the China Securities Journal. Car production slumped 20 per cent in October from a month earlier, the paper said. The crackdown on profligate vehicle loans takes two forms: raising the financial threshold for would-be borrowers and compiling a unified list of those who have defaulted on loans in an attempt to keep them from doing so again. ``Although the banks have exchanged defaulting clients' personal data, there is a need to enhance the black list, for example: to include guarantors and intermediary agents which help the defaulting buyers to get loans,'' a banker said. The drying up of bank financing has forced car dealers to look to vehicle finance companies to arrange credit for their customers. An official with a Beijing dealership said his company is in talks with Volkswagen Finance Company to allow car buyers to borrow up to 40 per cent of a new car's cost. ``If things go smoothly, the vehicle financing company will issue car loans to our customers next month, which we hope can boost sales,'' he said. Tang Sai-kit, who writes about cars for SAR and mainland car magazines, doubts such schemes will give much of a boost to car sales. ``The interest rates set by the car-financing firms are one percentage point higher'' than those of mainland banks, he said, which discourages would-be borrowers. Moreover, many people are putting off buying a car in anticipation that sticker prices, which have been declining, will fall even further. thestandard.com.hk