According to statistics released today by the Monetary Authority of Macao, money supply continued to grow in January. As total deposits grew at a faster pace than total loans, the overall loan-to-deposit ratio of the banking sector dropped from a month earlier.

Money supply

Currency in circulation grew 3.2% whereas demand deposits dropped 0.1%. M1 thus increased 0.5% from one month earlier. Concurrently, quasi-monetary liabilities rose 1.3%. The sum of these two items, i.e. M2, increased 1.2% to MOP493.4 billion. On an annual basis, M1 and M2 rose 5.3% and 7.1% respectively. The share of Pataca (MOP) in M2 stood at 26.7%, up 1.2 percentage points from a month ago or 2.1 percentage points from a year earlier. The share of Hong Kong Dollar (HKD) in M2 was 50.7%, down 0.1 percentage point month-to-month or 0.6 percentage points year-on-year. The share of Chinese Yuan (CNY) was 12.7%, down 1.4 percentage points month-to-month or 2.2 percentage points year-on-year. The share of United States Dollar (USD) was 7.8%, up 0.3 percentage points month-to-month or 0.7 percentage points year-on-year.

Deposits

Resident deposits increased 1.2% from the preceding month to MOP482.2 billion. Of which, MOP, HKD, USD and other foreign currency deposits increased at respective rates of 6.0%, 1.1%, 4.6% and 2.0% while CNY deposits decreased 8.5%. Non-resident deposits grew 9.7% to MOP240.7 billion. Public sector deposits with the banking sector increased 8.2% to MOP102.7 billion. As a result, total deposits with the banking sector rose 4.4% from a month earlier to MOP825.7 billion. The shares of MOP, HKD, CNY and USD in total deposits were 18.9%, 41.7%, 14.5% and 20.2% respectively.

Loans

Domestic loans to the private sector increased 1.7% from a month ago to MOP344.9 billion. Among which, MOP93.9 billion was MOP-denominated, MOP223.7 billion was denominated in HKD, MOP1.4 billion was denominated in CNY and MOP24.9 billion was denominated in USD, representing 27.2%, 64.9%, 0.4% and 7.2% of the total respectively. On the other hand, external loans dropped 0.5% to MOP348.9 billion; of which, loans denominated in MOP, HKD, CNY and USD accounted for 1.2% (MOP4.1 billion), 21.5% (MOP75.1 billion), 17.7% (MOP61.9 billion) and 54.8% (MOP191.2 billion) respectively.

Loan-to-deposit ratios

The loan-to-deposit ratio for the resident sector at end-January dropped 0.4 percentage points from the previous month to 59.0%. The ratio for both the resident and non-resident sectors also fell by 3.2 percentage points to 84.0%.