信托业的尴尬

CHINA’S TRUST SECTOR FACING AWKWARD SITUATION

“从业绩的角度来看，中国信托业在某种程度上是金融服务行业中增长最快的行业。”这是毕马威近期发布的《2011年中国信托业调查报告》（下称《报告》）的结论，近两年来，信托公司的利润经历了前所未有的高速增长，很多公司的管理规模增加了一倍，一些公司更是增加了两倍。

China’s trust sector has experienced high rates of profit growth these past few years. Nevertheless, there are still some hurdles that restrain the growth of the trust sector. One of them is that there is no fixed business model which can merely be operated by trust companies. Bank-trust cooperation products used to be very popular. However, the rapid growth of this product line and the off-balance sheet nature of many bank-trust products invited negative speculation on what was widely referred to as China’s shadow banking sector. It contradicted the goal of developing trust companies into innovative financial institutions. Thus, in the past two years, regulatory authorities issued a series of new regulations which restricted the growth of these products. There are also some restrictions on REITs.Now there are discussions on setting up a business model which only belongs to trust companies.