BEIJING: When Wu Qi and her husband traded in their Mazda 3 for a more expensive Mercedes Benz sedan, they applied for a 200,000 yuan ($29,000) bank loan to help pay for it. They got the money within minutes. Quick and easy access to credit has encouraged many young Chinese to go into the red to buy cars and apartments they could not otherwise afford. They are the faces of China’s growing addiction to debt, which along with government and corporate borrowing, has raised fears of a looming crisis and prompted Moody’s ratings agency to slash the country’s credit score last week for the first time in nearly three decades. “It is very easy — the car company encourages you to borrow the money and enjoy the car,” said Wu, 39, adding the couple is also paying off a one million yuan mortgage for a three-bedroom flat in Beijing. Since Chinese leaders turned on the credit taps in late 2008 to shield the country from the global recession, household borrowing has soared and pushed China’s overall debt liabilities above 260 percent of gross domestic product — compared with about 140 percent before the crisis hit. But slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy has raised concerns that years of risky lending could lead to a disaster worse than the US sub-prime collapse. “While such debt levels are not uncommon in highly rated countries, they tend to be seen in countries which have much higher per capita incomes, deeper financial markets and stronger institutions than China’s,” Moody’s said.