Over the past year, China’s once-flamboyant financial sector has been subject to strict oversight and rigorous regulatory compliance – a tightening of rules that has dampened moods and slammed shut pocketbooks that had been overflowing for decades.
At the same time, a structural overhaul has been gathering pace as more resources are diverted to bigger market players, with the smaller specimens consolidated through mergers and acquisitions.
“We had a big meeting and again they kept talking about the seriousness of the situation,” said a Shanghai-based analyst at a top Chinese investment bank on Monday. He spoke on the condition of anonymity.
For the analyst, the biggest change the industry has seen in the past year is much stricter regulatory supervision – though he said this is not necessarily a bad thing.
