Shadow banking now poses top risk to US stability, warns IMF

``While the explosion of China's shadow banking is well-known, Zhu Min said there has been a surge of lending by asset management funds and others non-bank players to US companies. This is outside normal control and is hard to track... The IMF estimates that contingent liabilities of these shadow forms of lending have reached $15 trillion in the US, using a "broad" measure of activities that captures new forms of risk. This is higher than in China. It is roughly 180pc of banking assets and is rising rapidly towards its pre-Lehman peak. It is particularly worrying since it was a "run" on the interlinked world of structured finance that caused the global crisis to metastasise in 2008.''