Senior Chinese officials are not generally inclined to quote Dickens, but in a recent speech China's top banking regulator waxed lyrical as he described the challenges facing the country's lenders this year.
“These are the best of times, these are the worst of times; this is the age of wisdom, this is the age of foolishness,” Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, told a financial forum in Hong Kong.
That same day news broke that the authorities had ordered some Chinese banks to temporarily halt lending altogether after the sector extended a total of Rmb1,100bn ($161bn, €114bn, £100bn) in new loans in just the first two weeks of January.
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