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The Chinese authorities’ efforts to contain leverage and reduce risk across the nation’s financial system took another step forward overnight with the ban on approvals for mutual funds that plan to allocate more than 80% of their portfolios to Hong Kong stocks. This looks like a response to surging capital flows into the territory from the mainland and the equity market euphoria in Asia, which saw the Hang Seng index cross the 30,000 mark last Wednesday for the first time in 10 years.

In early November, we discussed how commentators were disturbed by the sell-off in Chinese government bonds after the Party Congress, which saw yields rise to 4.0%. The anomaly was that yields in less-liquid, unsecured Chinese corporate bonds had barely moved. Some sleuthing on the part of the Wall Street Journal discovered that the most likely explanation was that redemptions in China’s shadow banking sector, especially in the infamous $4 trillion Wealth Management Products (WMP), meant that cash needed to be raised…quickly. Highly liquid government bonds were the easiest option.

Yesterday's China stock market rout, in which the Shanghai Composite tumbled the most since June 2016 to three month lows, and which prompted traders to question the dedication of Beijing's plunge protection team, appears to have been forgotten, with the Composite closing unchanged on Friday after some early session weakness, as Chinese yields declined broadly across the board from 3 years highs.

Following the market lockdown during October’s Party Congress, many commentators were disturbed by the continued rise in Chinese government bond yields as we returned to “business as usual”, with the 10-year rising to 4%. At the beginning of this month, we discussed the sell-off (see “China: Shadow Bank Inflows Are Critical To Sustain The Ponzi…But They’re Falling”) and noted a useful insight from the Wall Street Journal.

While the charade of sellside analysts releasing optimistic, and in the case of Barclays and Goldman "rationally exuberant"previews of the year ahead...