New yuan-denominated loans stood at 1.28 trillion yuan ($186.4 billion) in August, down from 1.45 trillion yuan in July, data from China's central bank showed Wednesday.
"The decrease was partly due to deleveraging efforts and a series of tight domestic macroeconomic policies the government has announced over the recent months," Dong Dengxin, director of the Finance and Securities Institute at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology told the Global Times on Wednesday.
"But seasonal fluctuations in yuan-dominated loans that range between 1 trillion and 1.5 trillion yuan are also quite normal," Dong said.
Dong forecast that yuan-denominated loans would continue to slow for some time, but the structure of lending will be optimized, and that will be positive for the sound and stable development of the domestic economy.
M2, a broad measure of money supply that covers cash in circulation and all deposits, rose 8.2 percent year-on-year to 178.87 trillion yuan as of the end of August, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said in a statement on its website.
