BEIJING: New loans extended by Chinese banks in July fell to their lowest level in two years, official data showed Friday, as authorities tighten credit on concerns over the country’s mounting debt problem. Chinese lenders gave out $69.8 billion in loans last month, the central People’s Bank of China (PBoC) said in a statement. It was the lowest figure since July 2014, according to a news agency, and a sharp fall from 1.38 trillion yuan banks lent in June. It was also far behind a median forecast of 850 billion yuan in a Bloomberg survey of economists. Easy credit has been an important policy tool as Beijing works to avoid a hard landing for the world’s second-largest economy, but many analysts are concerned the country faces a hangover from its debt binge. China’s total debt hit 168.48 trillion yuan at the end of last year, equivalent to 249 percent of national GDP, top government think tank the China Academy of Social Sciences has estimated. The country’s mostly state-controlled banks wrote off more than $300 billion of bad loans in the past three years, a high-ranking official with industry watchdog the China Banking Regulatory Commission said in June, as Beijing sought to reassure investors that China can cope with its mounting debt problem. The People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, warned in an op-ed in May that China must turn off the taps of credit-driven growth to avoid crisis in its financial system in the face of rising bad loans and other risks. China is a key driver of the world economy but grew at its slowest rate in a quarter of a century last year, and has decelerated further since then. “The impact of earlier monetary easing now appears to be waning with credit growth falling back as a result,” Capital Economics analyst Julian Evans-Pritchard said in a note. Official figures released Friday showed growth momentum further cooled in July as key indicators for retail sales, factory output and investment all showed weaker growth than in June.