Mortgage Borrowing Drops Amid China’s Property Woes

(Bloomberg) — China’s housing market continued to contract as the total amount of money lent out to buy residences shrank from a year earlier for the first time on record.

The outstanding amount of individual mortgages fell to 38.6 trillion yuan ($5.4 trillion) at the end of June, down 260 billion yuan from the same period a year earlier, according to data from the People’s Bank of China released Friday. That’s the first year-on-year drop in the data going back to 2011.