According to statistics released today by the Monetary Authority of Macao, money supply continued to drop in March. As total loans increased whereas total deposits dropped, the overall loan-to-deposit ratio of the banking sector rose from a month earlier.

Money supply

Currency in circulation dropped 5.7% whereas demand deposits grew 0.7%. M1 thus decreased 0.6% from one month earlier. Concurrently, quasi-monetary liabilities dropped 0.9%. The sum of these two items, i.e. M2, decreased 0.8% to MOP477.6 billion. On an annual basis, M1 and M2 rose 5.4% and 4.9% respectively. The share of Pataca (MOP) in M2 stood at 27.5%, down 0.1 percentage point from a month ago but up 2.9 percentage points from a year earlier. The share of Hong Kong Dollar (HKD) in M2 was 49.8%, down 0.4 percentage points month-to-month but up 0.1 percentage point year-on-year. The share of Chinese Yuan (CNY) was 11.9%, kept virtually stable month-to-month but down 4.7 percentage points year-on-year. The share of United States Dollar (USD) was 8.5%, up 0.4 percentage points month-to-month or 1.7 percentage points year-on-year.

Deposits

Resident deposits decreased 0.7% from the preceding month to MOP466.2 billion. Of which, MOP, HKD and CNY deposits decreased at respective rates of 0.6%, 1.7% and 0.6% while USD and other foreign currency deposits increased 4.0% and 0.8% respectively. Non-resident deposits dropped 3.4% to MOP236.5 billion. Public sector deposits with the banking sector increased 7.2% to MOP113.4 billion. As a result, total deposits with the banking sector dropped 0.5% from a month earlier to MOP816.1 billion. The shares of MOP, HKD, CNY and USD in total deposits were 19.7%, 41.4%, 13.7% and 20.6% respectively.

Loans

Domestic loans to the private sector increased 2.3% from a month ago to MOP354.2 billion. Among which, MOP95.2 billion was MOP-denominated, MOP233.8 billion was denominated in HKD, MOP1.9 billion was denominated in CNY and MOP21.8 billion was denominated in USD, representing 26.9%, 66.0%, 0.5% and 6.2% of the total respectively. Analysed by economic sector, “information technology”, “education” and “restaurants, hotels and similar” increased at respective rates of 29.3%, 21.1% and 16.7% compared with a quarter ago, whereas “non-monetary financial institutions” and “electricity, gas and water” dropped 54.4% and 7.1% respectively.

External loans dropped marginally by 0.1% to MOP354.6 billion; of which, loans denominated in MOP, HKD, CNY and USD accounted for 1.3% (MOP4.6 billion), 21.0% (MOP74.5 billion), 17.4% (MOP61.7 billion) and 55.3% (MOP196.1 billion) respectively.

Loan-to-deposit ratios

The loan-to-deposit ratio for the resident sector at end-March rose 0.9 percentage points from the previous month to 61.1%. The ratio for both the resident and non-resident sectors also grew by 1.3 percentage points to 86.9%.