Word: shadowed
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...Waiting in the Wings Your article "Iraq's Shadow Ruler" [Oct. 25], on Islamic Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, stated: "The version of democracy [the U.S.] went to war to create in Iraq may not be the one it gets. To achieve a stable, free Iraq, there's no going around the power?and preferences?of ... Sistani." I doubt, however, that Sistani would ever cooperate with a pro-U.S. regime in Iraq. After all, your story quoted the cleric as telling citizens to ask the Americans they meet, "When are you leaving Iraq?" Christopher Rushlau Mosul...
...private companies. Although these independents 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...
...difficult to ascertain how widespread shadow banking is throughout China. Beijing University economist Shen Minggao estimates that two-thirds of all financial activity in Zhejiang takes place outside the formal banking system. Local regulators do nothing to discourage informal lending because it funnels capital to vital, fast-growing businesses. But national economic conditions could now make it more difficult to look the other way. For one thing, China's inflation rate has crept above 5% while interest on savings deposits remains about 2%. In other words, Chinese lose money when they park cash in legitimate banks. It now appears that...
...banks remains unlikely, but shadow banking poses another problem to Beijing. China's technocrats are trying to slow the country's unsustainably high growth rates partly by curtailing lending. But financial czars have no control over money sloshing around in unregulated banking networks, making it difficult to enforce curbs. Illegal funds have defied the government by investing in overheated sectors such as real estate. State-run media blamed "wandering ghouls" from Wenzhou for driving up property prices in Shanghai last summer...
...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 of finance has given Zhejiang not only China's most vibrant private economy but also the lowest level of nonperforming bank loans...