Shadow Banking

Content :

1. What is shadow banking:

Definition

Functions

2. Shadow banking risks or why there is a problem?

3. China’s shadow banking

1.What it shadow banking system?

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it is a duck—or so the saying goes. But what about an institution that looks like a bank and acts like a bank? Often it is not a bank—it is a shadow bank.

Shadow banking, in fact, symbolizes one of the many failings of the financial system leading up to the global crisis. The term “shadow bank” was coined by economist Paul McCulley in a 2007 speech at the annual financial symposium hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In McCulley’s talk, shadow banking had a distinctly U.S. focus and referred mainly to nonbank financial institutions that engaged in what economists call maturity transformation. Commercial banks engage in maturity transformation when they use deposits, which are normally short term, to fund loans that are longer term. Shadow banks do something similar. They raise (that is, mostly borrow) short-term funds in the money markets and use those funds to buy assets with longer-term maturities. But because they are not subject to traditional bank regulation, they cannot—as banks can—borrow in an emergency from the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank) and do not have traditional depositors whose funds are covered by insurance; they are in the “shadows.”

Definition

The shadow banking system is a pejorative term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks. 

Commercial banks engage in maturity transformation when they use deposits, which are normally short term, to fund loans that are longer term. Shadow banks do something similar. They raise (that is, mostly borrow) short-term funds in the money markets and use those funds to buy assets with longer-term maturities. But because they are not...