seekingalpha.com/article/...moves-against-shadow-banking?ifp=0
..Over the past 12-months bank lending accounted for about 53% of the total financing, the remainder comes from the shadow banking sector.
In China, shadow banking often refers to the trust companies, which are non-bank lenders. At the end of last year, Chinese trust companies, 68 in all, have almost CNY11 trillion (~$1.8 trillion) assets under management; surpassing insurance companies to be the largest set of financial institutions behind the commercial banks. This is roughly a four-fold increase since 2010.
Trust companies typically raise funds by selling high yielding wealth management products. They use the proceeds to loan to risky borrowers, like property developers, local governments (through their special purpose vehicles), commodity producers, and businesses that banks have been discouraged to lend to, like those identified as suffering from over-investment, like steel.
China s key banking regulator has reportedly tightened up the rules governing the trust companies. First, the new rules seek to break the Ponzi scheme-like characteristic under which maturing products were paid from new product sales. The CBRC is banning trusts from operating "fund pools". This is the structure by which the fund makes cash payouts on maturing products with the proceeds from new product sales.
Of course, the trusts argue that such "fund pools" allow them to offer higher interest rates because such a mechanism allows a short-term investment to have the payout characteristics of a long-term investment. Most wealth management products have a year or less maturity.
A report by a Chinese securities house claimed that almost half of the wealth management products (CNY5.3 trillion) are due to mature this year. An estimated CNY3.5 trillion matured last year. The maturity peak this year is thought to be here in Q2.............