China Credit Growth Misses Expectations as New Loans Shrink

China’s credit expansion slowed far more than expected from a year earlier in April while banks extended less new loans, underscoring unusually anemic borrowing demand even for a typically slow month for lending.

Aggregate financing, a broad measure of credit, increased less than 630 billion yuan ($93 billion) in April, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data released by the People’s Bank of China on Thursday, compared with an expansion of 1.2 trillion yuan a year ago. That was about half of the median forecast of almost 1.3 trillion yuan by economists in a Bloomberg survey.