The price of money’s irrelevant if there’s no demand for it.

By appearances, officials in Beijing still haven’t come to terms with that.

When PBoC chief Pan Gongsheng scheduled a policy briefing for Tuesday, it was obvious rate cuts were in the offing. The last such briefing from Pan was in January, when he pre-announced a reduction to banks’ cash reserve requirement. He tipped another such reduction today, and a whole lot more besides.

But “more” won’t be “enough.” Not for an economy laboring beneath the world’s worst property crisis. And not for households grappling with the psychological albatross of creeping totalitarianism defined by the systematic extinguishment of individuality and the state-mandated subordination of selfhood to one man’s vision for the collective.

Pan’s 50bps RRR cut will free up CNY1 trillion of liquidity for new loans that no one wants. Remember: Credit’s an expression of faith in the future on the part of both the lender and the borrower. When there’s no demand for credit, you can read that as a lack of confidence among would-be borrowers.

Tuesday’s easing package also included a cut to the seven-day reverse repo rate, the short-term rate which serves as China’s de facto benchmark now. The one-year MLF rate (the de facto benchmark until a few months ago) will almost surely follow suit. That’s the rate off which banks set the price of two key consumer lending rates. Late last week, markets were disappointed when those rates were left unchanged.

More RRR cuts in addition to the move announced on Tuesday are possible, Pan suggested. He also said the PBoC will cut rates on the nation’s mortgage stock by half a point, and lowered the minimum mandated downpayment on second homes to 15% from 25%. That requirement was 30% just six months ago.

None of the above addresses demand. Nor the core problem in China, which is one-man rule by tyrant. No one penning strategy notes for banks can say anything about Xi, let alone call him what he is. But I beg of you: Don’t lose track of the fact that “strategy” pieces which don’t address the real source of the problem are by definition useless.

I suppose the mortgage-rate relief’s helpful at the margins. Pan suggested 150 million Chinese will save a combined $20 billion per year on interest. I’m not exactly in a position to argue the point with him. But as the figure below shows, rates were already at record lows.

Without pretending to have special insight into the mechanics of the Chinese mortgage market, I’d not-so-gently suggest that unless home prices stop falling — and until households feel better about their long-term prospects, both financial and otherwise — cutting financing costs isn’t likely to make much difference.

Remember: Price declines are ongoing. In fact, home prices fell the most in nearly a decade last month. Developers need to cut prices on new homes to clear inventory, but that risks perpetuating a worsening negative equity problem, and it could entrench the deflationary psychology Beijing’s desperate to dislodge before it’s too late.

Anyway you cut it (there’s a bad joke there), already-depressed Chinese aren’t going to put themselves into debt to lever up 7x on a depreciating asset. As for existing homeowners, three-quarters of China’s household savings are in some kind of property. Until prices turn around, you can forget about a consumer spending revival.

Pan also addressed China’s beleaguered equities, which are mired in a three-years-and-counting bear market. The PBoC will provide CNY800 billion of total liquidity support through two new facilities. One of those facilities lets brokerages, mutual funds and insurance companies pledge their stocks to Pan for government bonds and PBoC bills, a scheme which should boost those firms’ capacity and willingness to buy local shares “significantly,” as he put it. The PBoC rolled out a sister scheme designed to goad banks into financing buybacks.

Much as I despise Western free market rah-rah rhetoric, I gotta say: Schemes like those don’t generally work to boost sentiment on a sustainable basis because the attendant demand for local equities isn’t organic. It’s manufactured. It’s not an expression of confidence in the underlying businesses. It’s just, “Well, we bought these stocks because the government said that’s what we should do.” Private sector investors may try to piggyback on that for a short-term bounce, but that’s about it.

If you’re wondering whether all the new rate cuts will further undermine bank profitability, the answer’s “yes.” Sorry, the answer’s “no” because, as Pan explained, the RRR cut unlocks liquidity and besides, banks can just keep cutting deposit rates. Just in case, though, Beijing’s going to recapitalize China’s largest banks for the first time since the financial crisis. The specifics of that plan were… well, there were no specifics. An official offered only that capital “will be injected to different banks with different policies.”

What can I say? What can anybody say? Kudos to Pan for trying. But monetary policy can’t adequately address despondent consumer sentiment. That despondency is manifesting as a structural domestic demand problem, which is another way of saying China’s staring at deflation.

Behind it all: The country’s good governance crisis. That’s the real problem here. And it can only be “solved” by the will of 1.4 billion Chinese.