Generally speaking, financial institutions in various countries only engage in local currency deposit and loan business. However, after World War II, financial institutions in various countries began to engage in foreign currency deposit and loan business other than local currency, and financial institutions in some countries became foreign currency deposit and loan centers all over the world. This kind of financial activity, which specializes in foreign currency deposit and loan business, is collectively called offshore finance. In other words, any country, region or city that mainly deals in foreign currency (or deposits and loans) and deals with non-residents can be called an offshore financial center. Eurodollar market is a typical offshore financial center and a free international financial market with free transactions and no regulation. Offshore financial business is a bank wholesale business, with a large number of deposits and loans. Trading objects are usually banks and multinational companies, and have nothing to do with individuals. Its business is usually to introduce foreign funds and then lend them abroad.

The offshore market of Eurodollar is not the result of human power, but the natural generation of international political and economic factors. For example, during the Cold War, in order to avoid the supervision of the United States, Eastern European countries did not want to keep dollars in the United States but in European banks, and so did petrodollars in the 1970s. After World War II, American aid program and trade surplus with the United States led to a large amount of dollars outflow. The regulation of American financial market makes American interest rate, exchange rate, credit and loan mode compete with less regulated European financial market. In the 1970s, due to the expansion of international trade and investment and the increase of oil expenditure, the demand for money and credit in various countries expanded rapidly, and the efficient operation of offshore financial markets in Europe just adapted to this expansion of credit demand. For example, a flexible and diverse interest rate structure can reconcile the supply and demand of funds in different currencies and different maturities. During this period, both the short-term (within one year) European money market and the long-term (over one year) European bond market have achieved rapid development. At present, London has become the largest foreign exchange trading center in the world because it has the most active offshore trading market in the world (about $462 billion a day), and its dollar trading volume is higher than that of the United States (about $236 billion a day in the United States).

"Red-chip listing" mode means that the actual controller of a domestic enterprise sets up shell companies in offshore centers such as Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands and Bermuda in his own name, and then adds capital and shares to the shell companies with domestic equity or assets to acquire the assets of domestic enterprises, so as to achieve the purpose of curve overseas listing in the name of overseas shell companies.