De quoi sont capables les chinois ...

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Ca va bien avec l'alerte de ce matin:

L'organisme de régulation bancaire chinois a coupé l'internet des filiales d'une grosse banque pour l'empecher de distribuer des crédits.

Pulling the plug on China’s banks. Literally.
Posted by Tracy Alloway on Apr 16 08:30.

Here’s one way to put the brakes on China’s lending boom.

Simply pull the (electricity) plug on banks’ loan operations. From Caixin Online:

Branch loan officers for a major bank were gearing up for a new round of lending in late February when their computer screens suddenly froze.

It was not a technical glitch. The bank’s branch-to-headquarters intranet system for processing loan applications had been intentionally shut down, affecting its branches across the country.

Behind the intranet intervention was an effort by Chinese banking regulators to put a lid on the nation’s bank lending, which in January maintained a steady pace after soaring to more than 9 trillion yuan last year.

In some ways, the controls are working. Loans issued by the country’s largest banks, for example, fell significantly in the first quarter from last year’s levels. Yet some corners of the credit sector, such as off-balance sheet loans and lending by local banks, may be currently beyond regulatory reach.

In other words, Chinese bank regulators, most likely representatives of the country’s central bank, have revived the practice of capping monthly bank lending through administrative orders (cancellations?).

But the implication is that even with regulators resorting to such basic measures, there may be aspects of the financial system they are unable to reach — notably loans held off-balance sheet by the banks.

The whole Caixin article is well worth a read — not least for scary speculations such as the below:

And so-called off-balance sheet lending has been quietly expanding to what one bank executive called an “immense” scale, perhaps equaling on-balance sheet credit.

(H/T Sean Corrigan of Diapason Commodities)

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