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h brewer takes a long-term loan from a pension fund or a life insurer with long-term liabilities instead of from a bank. If the loan goes wrong, the creditor will lose money, but without the gelignite of leverage, the elaborate web of counterparties and the depositors demanding their money now, losses in one institution are less likely to damage others.

Yet shadow banks, if poorly regulated, can be just as dangerous as the better-lit sort. One of the principal culprits in the financial crisis was the “structured investment vehicle”, a legal entity created by banks to sell loans repackaged as bonds. These were notionally independent, but when they got into trouble they pulled in the banks that had set them up. Another source of instability were money-market funds, through which firms and individuals invested spare cash for short spells. These had been thought of as risk-free. When it became apparent that they were not, they suffered a run.

The disaster taught regulators useful lessons. The shadow banks that caused the biggest problems had either big maturity mismatches or not enough capital to absorb losses. Most troublesome of all were those whose difficulties infected the banks, because the banks had either lent them money or had provided them with a backstop of some kind. Not surprisingly, the shadow banks that were created solely to take advantage of a less exacting regulatory regime turned out to be just as fragile and dangerous as banks.

New regulations in many countries aim to make such shams impossible. Banks must now incorporate structured investment vehicles on their balance-sheets, for instance. Money-market funds must hold more liquid assets, to guard against runs. Limits on leverage have been imposed or are being considered for many forms of shadow bank。

Yet as Mr Carney’s anxieties suggest, the job of making shadow banks safe is far from complete. For instance, American regulators are still allowing some money-market funds to create the impression that an investor can never lose money in them. They should be forced to be more honest.

But the bigger danger lies in China, where regulatory arbitrage is happening on an alarming scale. Banks there are banned from expanding lending to certain industries, and from luring deposits by offering high returns. So they do both of these things indirectly, through shadow banks of various sorts. Meanwhile, some firms are setting themselves up as pseudo-banks: one shipyard makes a third of its money from finance. It is hard to imagine that all the shadowy loans to unprofitable steel mills and overextended property developers will pay off. Yet investors are being encouraged to pile in by a series of bail-outs that have so far shielded them from most of the harm when such loans have soured.

This is a crisis in the making. It will not bring China down—the government can use state-owned banks to temper its effects, and it has enough cash to spend lavishly to set things right. But it could still cost a lot. The sooner the regime spells out which assets are protected, the sooner investors will take more care about risk. Shadow banking can make finance safer, but only if it is clear whose money is on the line.

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