Reuters Special Report - China's answer to subprime bets: the "Golden Elephant"

Found via Mish.

The Chinese investment vehicle known as "Golden Elephant No. 38" promises buyers a 7.2 percent return per year. That's more than double the rate offered on savings accounts nationally.

Absent from the product's prospectus is any indication of the asset underpinning Golden Elephant: a near-empty housing project in the rural town of Taihe, at the end of a dirt path amid rice fields in one of China's poorest provinces.

"They haven't even built a proper road here," said Li Chun, a car repairman, who said he lives in the project. 

"The local government is holding onto the flats and only wants to sell them when prices go up."

Golden Elephant No. 38 is one of thousands of "wealth-management products", instruments aimed at monied investors, which have shown phenomenal growth over the last five years. Sales of them soared 43 percent in the first half of 2012 to 12.14 trillion yuan ($1.90 trillion), according to a report by CN Benefit, a Chinese wealth-management consultancy.

They are usually created in China's "shadow banking" system - non-banking institutions that are not subject to the same regulations as banks - which has grown to account for around a fifth of all new financing in China.

Like the subprime-debt lending spree in the United States that helped spark the 2008 financial crisis, the products are often opaque, and usually dependent on high-risk underlying assets, such as the Taihe housing project.