Chinese banks have embarked on a new round of capital raising, prompted by regulations on shadow banking that are forcing lenders to bring shadow loans back on to their balance sheets.
Pressure on banks to boost capital is an important element of Beijing’s broader effort to contain financial risks from the country’s extraordinary debt growth over the past decade.
For most of that period, banks’ dominance of China’s financial system has waned as non-bank lenders and capital markets expanded. But the new rules forbid banks from packaging off-balance-sheet loans into “wealth management products” that combine high yields with an implicit guarantee against default. That has spurred a revival of traditional bank lending.