Even in banking China resembles Germany. Chinese banking has three layers, the big four (or five) aka ICBC, the 45 regional banks, still massive but you have never heard of them, and then thousands of small local banks.
The top ones are well regulated and strong, account for 50% of all assets, and deal almost exclusively with state owned enterpises and the very largest private companies. The last 4,000 which are poorly capitalized and account for 15% of total bank assets provide mortgages to Chinese people and loans to property developers.
Their bread and butter new business died five years ago, when the Chinese government created the long overdue real estate correction. They are being hit on all sides of their balance sheet, which is a consequence of the implosion of the bubble. In the past, these banks would have been rescued by THE local government where they operated, which would buy the non-performing assets. That doesn't work anymore, because the state and local governments are broke.
The new strategy is consolidation. In the past months 40 of these banks have been merged together. This too will fail, because if you take 10 bad banks and put them together you still have one bad bank, second the Chinese savers are not idiots, and have already transferred their assets from the small regional banks to the bigger one, these regional banks will be entirely funded from Loans from the big banks.
All this is done for one reason, delay the inevitable for a few more years. The reasons there are simple there are no upfront costs to mergers, it looks like something is being done, hard decisions can not only be deferred but are someone's responsability. The immedate impact is that small private company have seen their access to capital fall to zero.
The lucky trifecta!
Note: The failure of Chinese banks will not directly affect the Western banking system. It will further centralize all economic activity in China. This is the death of private enterprises in China.
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