Special products with names like Plentiful Money and Treasure and Rise High and Make Returns with Ease are hawked by salespeople at the China Merchants Bank branch on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in central Beijing.
Many of these popular products are collections of bank loans and other assets that have been “informally securitised” through lightly regulated Chinese trust companies and repackaged into financial products that offer decent returns with little apparent risk.
Even products with promised annual returns of up to 11 per cent – far above the benchmark one-year bank deposit rate of 2.25 per cent – are “almost without risk and very safe”, according to one eager China Merchants salesman.