Chart of the Day: China’s Personal Mortgages Post First Decline in a Decade

China’s personal mortgages registered the first year-on-year decline on record at the end of the second quarter, putting further pressure on policymakers to prop up a recovery in the housing market that has been losing steam after a brief rebound at the start of this year.

At the end of June, outstanding mortgages fell 0.7% from a year earlier to 38.6 trillion yuan ($5.3 trillion), a report released Friday by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) showed. That marks the first such drop in available quarter-end data going back to 2013.