Chinese property companies perform shadow banking

While the degree to which China’s banking system is exposed to its red-hot real estate sector has long concerned analysts, a new report from CreditSights suggests a fresh link is growing. Chinese property developers such as Greenland Hong Kong Holdings, Country Garden Holdings, and China Evergrande Group have been offering loans and other financial products to retail investors as a way to drive revenue, diversify their business, or repay debt, Bloomberg reports.  State-linked Greenland, for example, aims to grow the unit’s assets under management from 5.7 billion yuan ($854 million) at the end of the first half of 2016 to 50 billion yuan by 2018. Its mobile wealth management platform currently has around 50,000 users and has sold more than 2,000 products with an average investment of around 173,000 yuan.