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"EU to push crowdfunding, venture capital for businesses," CNBC Jonathan Hill, European Union commissioner for financial services and capital markets, said SMEs shouldn't depend too heavily on traditional banks but instead also look to options like crowdfunding and venture capital. "If you've got a system that's very dependent on one source of funding, and you have a contraction in bank funding like we had, then that has a very real knock onto the economy," Hill told CNBC. "P2P lending rises to record US$15.3b," Shanghai Times Peer-to-peer lending platforms in China continue to break records. Total lending transactions on China's more than 2,200 lending platforms quadrupled this August compared to the same month last year. Chinese authorities have recently unveiled a series of new regulations for the industry, the impacts of which have not yet become clear. "This travel jacket is the most funded clothing item in the history of crowdfunding," Tech Crunch How much is a jacket worth? This one is worth more than $9 million to the nearly 45,000 backers of the project. The Baubax travel jacket — a utility jacket featuring numerous specialty pockets — smashed Kickstarter records to become the most backed clothing item in the site's history. "Crowdfunding college: More students depend on kindness of strangers," CNBC To combat rising educational costs, many students are turning to their networks and the larger public to help finance their educations. So far in 2015, more than 130,000 GoFundMe accounts dedicated to supporting educational costs have been created and raised more than $20,000. "It makes total sense," said Kelsea Little, media director for GoFundMe. "College is becoming increasingly more difficult to pay for and scholarships are becoming more competitive, so crowdfunding offers a brand new and fresh alternative that anyone can take advantage of."