Bloomberg reports China’s central bank is expanding the fight to monitor and control risks emerging in the burgeoning market for loosely-regulated shadow lending. The People’s Bank of China has started collecting data from the murky world of online financing, in which firms make loans for everything from weddings to mining projects. It’s a growing part of a shadow banking market that ballooned 30 percent last year to 53 trillion yuan ($8.1 trillion), or four-fifths the size of the economy. The PBOC has switched gears from stimulating growth in an easing cycle that started late 2014 to clamping down on the financial and debt risks that threaten to derail a tenuous stabilization.
China Economic Review