It has also contributed to the rise in shadow banking. China’s fiscal stimulus program encouraged the state-owned banks to lend even further to large, state-owned enterprises. The government was rightly worried about investment expanding too quickly—after all, overinvestment and the resulting bubble in the U.S. housing sector offered a cautionary tale. So China sought to restrict wider borrowing. Local governments and smaller enterprises, however, were eager for capital to invest in their own areas, and financial institutions, unsurprisingly, found ways around government constraints. This created a surge in China’s shadow banking sector, which increased its informal and private lending to small businesses and wealthy customers, much of it off-balance-sheet.