Word: gray
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...fuel most of the area's economic growth and provide most of the jobs, they usually are shut out from borrowing by China's four big state-owned banks, which typically ignore small private ventures. So when entrepreneurs need capital, they turn to "shadow" banks?China's vast, flourishing gray market of unregulated lenders, including companies run by people like Ye, associations made up of citizens who pool their savings to invest and to lend among themselves, and informal lending between firms...
...past, Beijing might have responded by cracking down and throwing a few people in jail for loan sharking. That hasn't happened for the simple reason that the gray-market provides an efficient means of capital allocation in ways the country's socialist-era financial system cannot. The People's Bank of China, the central bank, discovered this recently when it started monitoring gray-market capital flows in Zhejiang. Expecting to find shadow bankers charging exorbitant rates, they instead discovered that underground interest rates were only marginally higher than what banks offer and repayment terms were better. This steady source...
...whole, the government has turned a benevolent eye toward illicit finance. Cracking down would be "like taking seed grain away from farmers," says Beijing University's Shen. Gray-market lending is even providing inspiration for a new generation of would-be private bankers. A group of scholars at Zhejiang's Communist Party School, a training ground for cadres, are proposing to "establish legal private banks" along the lines of underground institutions, according to one of the professors who helped draft the proposal...
...predictably, Kerry was furious. Four years before, Clinton had been shunned by his own Vice President, and more than a few Democrats believe that hurt Gore. But even so, there were dangers in flying too close to the Sun King now, not the least of which was how a gray presence like Kerry could disappear in the glare. There were those who believed that Clinton's real interest was less in helping Kerry win in 2004 than in clearing the way for Hillary...
...some wondered how so much power could fit into a single plastic cartridge and others mulled over what drug-fortified madness put two Italian plumbers in a world of angry, portly mushrooms, the rest of us stopped thinking altogether and rocked the Power Pad. That Power Pad, an ungainly gray spread dotted with red and blue circles (with white shine marks for pseudo-3-D flair) was the portal wherein one could enter into the high-octane dope-pumping wonderland of events like the “110 Meter Hurdles” and “Long Jump...