China's radical experiment

China is throwing everything at its economic problems. As weaker exports drag the country's growth to the slowest annual pace since 1990, the People’s Bank of China has implemented no fewer than 15 measures in the past four months alone to stabilise the economy. These include a series of reductions in banks’ reserve requirements, or the amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves against lending. That’s still not enough, however. Credit is not quite flowing where it’s needed – Chinese lenders don’t have sufficient capital to lend to households and smaller companies - so the PBOC believes it needs another weapon.