Official: impossible to buy car with housing fund

Shanghai, January 8 (Gasgoo.com) In response to the media report that the housing funds are likely to be used for car purchase in future, an official from Beijing's housing funds management center said that it is impossible to buy cars with the housing funds and their center is different from the bank, said a local newspaper yesterday.

Dec 25, the National Passenger Car Information Exchange Association (NPCIEA) submitted a proposal to several ministries of the State Council, suggesting that the government should ease its auto credit policy and convert part of its idle housing funds, now amounting to 400 billion yuan ($58.39 billion), to finance car purchases, as a move to boost the sluggish auto market.

The association said that a looser auto credit policy similar to the favorable housing credit policy should shore up auto consumption on credit to 13 percent, and push up a four percent increase in auto sales in 2009.

An auto sales executive in Beijing said that this proposal would be unacceptable to most people who regularly pay their portions of the housing funds for their housing loans. To the common people, home-buying is more urgent and necessary than car purchase. There are many better measures to boost the auto market, such as fuel price cuts and infrastructure improvement.

Yesterday, a director of the Beijing Housing Funds Management Center told reporters that it is impossible to buy cars with a loan from the housing funds which are used as loans for the funds-payers to buy houses or apartments. Using the housing funds to buy cars would infringe upon the home-buying rights of other payers of the funds. The official added that the housing funds center is not a bank.

Officials of China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) also said that the semi-official NPCIEA association can't represent the auto industry and the buying-car-with-housing-funds proposal by the NPCIEA is an impractical solution.