Facing a liquidity gap of 3 trillion yuan before the Spring Festival of the Year of the Horse

The liquidity gap before the Spring Festival this time is mainly due to the concentrated accumulation of various funding needs, with various types of matured funds resonating with the demand for new payments and withdrawals, further increasing the pressure on the funding side. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, before the Spring Festival holiday, there will be a concentrated maturity of 405.5 billion yuan of 7-day reverse repurchase and 500 billion yuan of buyout reverse repurchase, with a total maturity capital of over 900 billion yuan, creating significant pressure for capital recovery; At the same time, the first half of February will also face the pressure of nearly 1.4 trillion yuan of local debt and treasury bond payments, and large-scale government bond payments will further occupy the liquidity of the banking system. In addition, Huaxi Securities' calculations show that in February, due to the impact of residents' demand for cash withdrawals during the Spring Festival, the expected cash withdrawal scale will reach about 900 billion yuan. The concentrated withdrawal of cash by residents will directly consume the excess reserve funds of banks, leading to a decrease in the available funds in the interbank market. It is worth noting that the recent foreign exchange settlement behavior may further exacerbate the liquidity tension in the interbank market by consuming excess reserve requirements of banks at the margin. The combination of multiple factors has led to a liquidity gap of over 3 trillion yuan.

Faced with this huge seasonal liquidity gap, the People's Bank of China has not passively waited. Instead, it has continued its usual practice of early layout and proactive efforts, gradually expanding the scale of long-term and short-term capital investment, and providing stable support for pre holiday capital. From the perspective of recent operations, in January this year, the Central Bank took the lead in doubling the purchase scale of treasury bond in the open market. At the same time, combined with a variety of monetary policy tools such as Medium Term Loan Facility (MLF) and buyout reverse repo, it injected a total of 1.1 trillion yuan of medium and long-term funds into the financial market, replenished market liquidity in advance, and alleviated the potential pressure on capital. Just last week, the central bank further increased its investment in cross sector funds, restarting the long suspended 14 day reverse repurchase operation ahead of schedule, with a total investment of 600 billion yuan in cross sector funds. At the same time, a net investment of 100 billion yuan was achieved through routine 3-month buyout reverse repurchase. The dual operation effectively released a clear signal of the central bank's protection of the capital side and laid the foundation for further investment.

At present, the market has clear expectations for the central bank's subsequent capital injection actions, and it is generally believed that the central bank will further increase its operational intensity this week, continuously injecting liquidity through a combination of reverse repurchase and buyout reverse repurchase tools, and fully hedging various financial pressures. Industry insiders have analyzed that the liquidity gap before the Spring Festival is a seasonal norm, and the central bank has successfully stabilized the volatility and maintained the stability of the capital market through precise and timely capital injection in the past few years. Based on the current pace of investment initiated by the central bank, it is highly likely that the scale and tool period of investment will be flexibly adjusted according to the tightness of the funding situation in the future. This will not only meet various reasonable funding needs before the holiday, but also avoid excessive easing of the funding situation, achieving the regulatory goal of "stabilizing fluctuations and ensuring stability".