China’s Credit Growth Misses Expectations as New Loans Contract

China’s credit expansion slowed far more than expected from a year earlier in April while new loans extended by the country’s banks shrank, hurt by a seasonal slowdown in lending.

Aggregate financing, a broad measure of credit, increased 621 billion yuan ($91 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 less than half of the median forecast of almost 1.3 trillion yuan by economists in a Bloomberg survey.