THE head of China’s securities regulator has become the second senior finance industry official this month to highlight the lack of skilled professionals to handle the agency’s ever-widening responsibilities amid turmoil that rocked the nation’s markets.

    Many employees at the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) had left amid mounting pressure from rapid changes in capital markets, Xiao Gang, chairman of the CSRC, said at the agency’s annual meeting Saturday. Measures have to be taken to deal with the exodus, he said.

    “We have to treat this properly to transform the pressure to motivation,” Xiao said, as part of a broader speech that reflected on the regulator’s weaknesses following a review of the gyrations that had driven the stock market’s rapid boom-to-bust cycles since mid-2014.

    The comments came about a week after Li Jiange, vice chairman of Central Huijin Investment, a unit of China’s sovereign wealth fund, blamed the CSRC’s talent shortage for the turmoil. The regulator has drawn criticism recently over the functioning of market mechanisms, most recently earlier this month when it scrapped a stock circuit breaker system just four days after its introduction.

    Stock market crises will return if the regulator doesn’t resolve its talent shortage, Li said at a conference Jan. 9.

    Li, who is also a former CSRC vice chairman, cited reasons such as a less competitive compensation mechanism and curbs on government employees’ spouses and children from working overseas for exacerbating the exodus of talent from the regulator.

    Li questioned if the regulator was capable of providing effective supervision if the quality of its officials failed to keep up with those that they are supposed to govern.

    In his speech, Xiao prescribed solutions to solving the shortage such as by providing targeted training to officials whose skills don’t match the tasks they’re given.

    Xiao also recommended charting career development plans and responding to “reasonable requests,” citing legitimate compensation and employment benefits among items that need to be guaranteed. (SD-Agencies)