Definition
An aspect of the shadow banking system involving assets defined by non-bank lending where the debt is not issued or traded on the public markets, unlike corporate bonds and municipal bonds.
In Context
- "Holonym: shadow banking system"
- "The man who led Goldman Sachs through the 2008 financial crash says he can “smell” a fresh crisis brewing. Lloyd Blankfein said he saw parallels to the global financial crisis and saw signs the economy was getting closer to a crash. “I wonder where there’s hidden secret leverage,” he said in an interview with Pablo Salame, Citadel’s co-chief investment officer. “Now everyone says, ‘Oh, the world’s not leveraged.’ That’s exactly what everybody said in the mortgage crisis until you suddenly discover that there was a lot of mortgage risk in Iceland.” “It sort of smells like that kind of a moment again,” Mr Blankfein added. […] Mr Blankfein, who ran Goldman from 2006 until 2018, said the financial system appeared to be moving towards another catastrophe as a result of the boom in private credit, a corner of the market often referred to as shadow banking. He criticised private credit lenders for attempting to encourage retail access at a time when they are most unstable. “One has to worry about opaque assets where there’s illiquidity,” he told Bloomberg in a separate interview. “We’re getting close to the end of late stages of cycles on this and we’re due for a kind of a reckoning.” While tougher regulations for banks following the financial crisis have boosted their resilience, it has also pushed traditional lending activities towards shadow banking. Private credit lenders do not take deposits and so are not subject to the kind of strict regulations as banks. […] Private credit companies have increasingly been launching vehicles that allow ordinary investors to back the loans it extends to businesses."