What institutions are examples of "shadow banking"? I often hear the term shadow banking tossed around when discussing the United States and Chinese economies. What exactly is shadow banking and could you give examples of some specific companies that act as "shadow banks"? I have been told that in China, shadow banking refers to informal loans that are not written up in any documentation. Is this correct?
While whomever told you about &quot;shadow banking&quot; in China is correct that in an international context, the term can often refer to informal banking arrangements (the earliest use of the term); however, these days, it is usually used in the sense first coined by Paul McCulley in a speech he delivered (&quot;Teton Reflections&quot;) at the 2007 Jackson Hole conference. He described them as:

[T]he whole alphabet soup of levered up non-bank investment conduits, vehicles, and structures...
Unlike regulated real banks, who fund themselves with insured deposits, backstopped by access to the Fed’s discount window, unregulated shadow banks fund themselves with un-insured commercial paper, which may or may not be backstopped by liquidity lines from real banks.

Structured investment vehicles, as noted by Kitsune, are certainly one type of shadow bank, but nonbank broker-dealers, certain real estate investment trusts, and particular hedge funds can be viewed as types of shadow bank. The question to ask in determining whether an entity is a &quot;shadow bank&quot; is twofold— do they:

perform credit, liquidity, or maturity transformation; and
fund themselves through uninsured wholesale deposits (without recourse to liquidity facilities)?

As a direct answer to your question, Pozsar, Adrian, Ashcraft, and Boesky (2010) say:

Examples of shadow banks include finance companies, asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) conduits, structured investment
vehicles (SIVs), credit hedge funds, money market mutual funds, securities lenders, limited-purpose finance companies (LPFCs), and the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs).

I strongly recommend clicking on that link and taking your time to browse the map on page 2.
It's worth noting both that many of these entities have existed for long periods of time without incident, and that due to choices in how banking is regulated, shadow banks are often the result of a desire to both limit the scope of regulation and to limit the risk of failure within the scope of regulation— which has the effect of pushing intermediation activities outside the regulated sphere.