China’s repo market shows just how risky China Huarong Asset Management Co.’s bonds are perceived to be within the mainland, despite being majority-owned by the finance ministry, Bloomberg News reported. Borrowers putting up a Huarong Securities 2023 bond for collateral now get just 40% of the note’s face value as cash, down from 91% at the start of April, according to China Securities Depository and Clearing Corp. data. The decline in effective value illustrates the stunning loss of confidence in a company that’s crucial to China’s banking system.
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The Tokyo Olympics, postponed in 2020 during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, are facing increasing hurdles in putting on a 2021 show, CNN.com reported. The latest troubling sign for the Summer Games came on Monday when the State Department advised U.S. citizens against traveling to Japan because of a sharp increase in Covid-19 cases. The "Level 4: Do Not Travel" advisory is the highest cautionary level in the department's hierarchy of warnings. It's been more than a year since Americans have paid tourist calls to the nation. Japan has been closed to U.S.
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Promoters, managing directors and chairmen, who stand as personal guarantors to corporate loans, can also be proceeded against before the company law tribunal if their firms are unable to repay debts, ruled the Indian Supreme Court on Friday as it declared “legal and valid” a November 15, 2019, notification issued by the Union government under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), the Hindustan Times reported. “It is held that the impugned notification was issued within the power granted by Parliament, and in valid exercise of it.
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PT Garuda Indonesia needs to completely restructure its business, potentially reducing the number of planes it operates to less than half its main fleet as the airline seeks to survive the crisis wrought by the pandemic, its president told staff last week, Bloomberg News reported. “We have to go through a comprehensive restructuring, a total one,” President Director Irfan Setiaputra said in an address to staff on May 19, according to a recording heard by Bloomberg.
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Even by the standards of a record-breaking global credit binge, China’s corporate bond tab stands out: $1.3 trillion of domestic debt payable in the next 12 months, Bloomberg News reported. That’s 30% more than what U.S. companies owe, 63% more than in all of Europe and enough money to buy Tesla Inc. twice over. What’s more, it’s all coming due at a time when Chinese borrowers are defaulting on onshore debt at an unprecedented pace. The combination has investors bracing for another turbulent stretch for the world’s second-largest credit market.
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India’s Oyo Hotels is looking to raise $600 million in debt to bolster its finances after a fresh coronavirus surge decimated travel demand and hurt the company’s recovery effort, Bloomberg News reported. The board of Oyo, or Oravel Stays Pvt as the parent company is officially called, approved a plan for an institutional term loan at meetings over Wednesday and Thursday. Oyo is one of the larger startups in Softbank Group Corp.’s portfolio and its headlong global expansion was backed and fostered by the investor’s billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son.
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Qantas Airways Ltd. and Singapore Airlines Ltd. are traveling in opposite directions when it comes to the coronavirus crisis, with the former emerging strongly thanks to its buoyant home market and the latter mired in trouble with record losses as it can barely fly anywhere, Bloomberg News reported. While not out of the woods just yet, Qantas said Thursday it expects revenue from routes within Australia to almost double in the six months through June from the second half of last year.
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A cyberattack on Ireland’s health system has paralyzed the country’s health services for a week, cutting off access to patient records, delaying Covid-19 testing, and forcing cancellations of medical appointments, the New York Times reported. Using ransomware, which is malware that encrypts a victims’ data until they pay a ransom, the people behind the attack have been holding hostage the data at Ireland’s publicly funded health care system, the Health Service Executive. The attack forced the H.S.E. to shut down its entire information technology system.
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Concern over China Huarong Asset Management Co.’s financial health is deepening among domestic investors, threatening to worsen a selloff offshore, Bloomberg News reported. The firm’s thinly traded 19 billion yuan note due 2022 fell 12% to 70.2 yuan on Thursday, according to Bloomberg-compiled data, while its 3.54% domestic bond maturing in November dropped 24% to 75.3 yuan, both on pace for record lows. The company’s dollar bonds also declined, with a 3.75% bond due 2022 falling 5.5 cents on the dollar to 73.6 cents, its weakest level in more than a month.
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China is — yet again — looking to deal with its mountain of hidden debt. An absurd solution has emerged: just make it go away. But much like a landfill, it won’t ever quite disappear, according to a Bloomberg commentary. Earlier this month, Zhao Quanhou, a top researcher at the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences, which is affiliated with the finance ministry, proposed that Beijing should dissolve some of its off-balance sheet debt by converting it into legal, or statutory, debt.
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