Chinese Bank Run Turns Violent: Angry Crowd Storms Bank Of China

Chinese Bank Run Turns Violent After Angry Crowd Storms Bank of China Branch Over Frozen Deposits

TYLER DURDEN

While the world of high, and not so high finance, is obsessing over the volatility of cryptos and recent painful losses for overlevered players who - much to the amazement of plain vanilla equity investors - were not bailed out by a magnanimous Fed (which however only rescues stock markets, not cryptos), things in China with its $54 trillion financial system, or more than double the size of assets across US commercial banks, are once again getting heated.

As Reuters reports, a large crowd of angry Chinese bank depositors faced off with police Sunday in the city of Zhengzhou, and many were injured as they were taken away, amid the freezing of their deposits by some rural-based banks.

The banks froze millions of dollars worth of deposits in April, telling customers they were upgrading their internal systems. The banks have not issued any communication on the matter since, depositors said.

According to Chinese media the frozen deposits across the various local banks could be worth up to $1.5 billion and authorities are investigating the three banks.

On Sunday, about 1,000 people gathered outside the Zhengzhou branch of China's central bank on Sunday to demand action; they held up banners and chanted slogans on the wide steps of the entrance to a branch of China’s central bank in the city of Zhengzhou in Henan province, about 620 kilometers (380 miles) southwest of Beijing.

The protesters are among thousands of customers who opened accounts at six rural banks in Henan and neighboring Anhui province that offered higher interest rates. They later found they could not withdraw their funds after media reports that the head of the banks’ parent company was on the run and wanted for financial crimes.

Videos and photographs on social media showed depositors waving banners and throwing plastic bottles at approaching security guards who then roughly dragged some of the protesters away.

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