Financing obtained by the real economy from the entire financial system — bank loans, government and corporate bonds, equity, plus off-balance-sheet items like trust loans and bankers' acceptances. As the fullest carrier of China's credit impulse, TSF has historically led nominal growth by two to three quarters, making it the first chart for calling the Chinese cycle.
This page shows both social financing flow and social financing stock. Flow is monthly new financing; stock is the end-period balance. Both level series are in CNY 100mn.
How to use it: Flow is best viewed as level or YTD to track the pace of new credit creation. Stock is best viewed as level or official YoY growth to track the broad credit cycle.
Interpretation note: Flow YoY percentages can be noisy because of Lunar New Year timing and issuance schedules. Stock YTD is not very meaningful because stock is already an end-period balance.
Why it matters: The story in recent years is composition, not headline: government bonds' share of new TSF keeps climbing, meaning the engine of credit creation has been switching from private borrowing to fiscal issuance — the same TSF growth rate no longer means what it used to. Keep two constructions of different orders distinct: TSF stock YoY minus nominal GDP growth gives the direction of the macro leverage ratio (credit expanding or contracting relative to income); the credit impulse proper is the change in new TSF as a share of GDP — second-order, because it is the change in the flow of credit, not the growth of the stock, that maps to the change in spending. Separately, TSF ex-government-bonds is the clean read on private credit demand: persistent weakness there, with the total propped up by government paper, is the credit fingerprint of the balance-sheet-recession-like pattern China has shown since 2023.