Tianqi Lithium Corp. plans to sell a minority stake in the world’s biggest lithium mine, giving the producer access to the cash it needs to repay the major loan behind its ballooning financial troubles, Bloomberg News reported. Australian miner IGO Ltd. will pay $1.4 billion in cash for a 49% stake in Tianqi Lithium Energy Australia Pty, the majority shareholder in the Greenbushes mine in the country’s west, according to a statement to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

Relations between the United States and China promise to be fraught even under President-elect Joe Biden’s administration, Bloomberg News reported in a commentary. There’s one area where the two rivals can and should cooperate immediately, however: to head off a looming debt crisis that threatens to hurl millions into poverty across Africa, Latin America and Asia. When many of the world’s poorest countries last found themselves unable to service their debts 25 years ago, the U.S. led a global effort — the 1996 Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative — to forgive much of that debt.

China is bucking the global trend of greater economic stimulus amid the coronavirus, preferring instead to refocus on controlling its record debt burden, Bloomberg News reported. Policy makers are allowing for tighter liquidity in the financial system, a signal that Beijing wants to stabilize the level of debt in the economy. Though not as aggressive as previous deleveraging drives, the shift is pushing up market rates: government-bond yields trade near an 18-month high and interbank borrowing costs last month jumped to the highest since January.

Bankrupt carrier Jet Airways India Ltd., once the nation’s biggest airline by market value, is planning to restart operations as a full-service carrier by the summer of 2021, its new owners announced, Bloomberg News reported. A consortium led by Dubai-based entrepreneur Murari Lal Jalan and Kalrock Capital has set a revival plan for Jet Airways, which includes a dedicated freighter service and hubs in small Indian cities beyond Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.

The Reserve Bank of India will undertake closer scrutiny and auditing of shadow lenders and large urban co-operative banks in a bid to improve supervision of the financial sector, Bloomberg News reported. The central bank will implement risk-based audits at shadow lenders and urban co-operative banks that focus on localized lending, Governor Shaktikanta Das said Friday. It will also harmonize guidelines relating to the appointment of auditors across all types of lenders.

Creditors of China’s Yongcheng Coal & Electricity Holding Group Co have agreed to repayment plans for two commercial paper issues after the state-owned miner defaulted on them in late November, underwriters said on Friday, Reuters reported. Defaults by highly rated Chinese state firms including Yongcheng caught the world’s second-largest bond market off guard last month and prompted speculation that Beijing may be renewing a deleveraging push interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

China’s fast growing $15tn onshore bond market has been rattled by a wave of defaults by state-owned enterprises that threaten to expose systemic weaknesses across the financial system of the world’s second-largest economy, the Financial Times reported. More bond defaults are expected to follow as Beijing has indicated that it is no longer prepared to help state-owned debtors that run into trouble. But the ending of China’s deeply entrenched system of implicit government guarantees has left investors struggling to price credit risks.

Global debt is set to reach $200 trillion, or 265% of the world’s annual economic output, by the end of the year, S&P Global has forecast - although it doesn’t expect a crisis any time soon, Reuters reported. The credit ratings giant said it amounted to a 14-point rise as a percentage of world GDP, having been amplified by both the economic plunge caused by COVID and the extra borrowing that governments, firms and households have had to resort to. “Global debt-to-GDP has been trending up for many years; the pandemic simply exacerbated the rise,” S&P’s report said.

Japan should consider creating a safety net for companies that may need help surviving the hit from the coronavirus pandemic, such as airlines and transportation firms, said Heizo Takenaka, a close aide to premier Yoshihide Suga, Reuters reported. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) also may need to support financial institutions if they suffer huge losses from big bailouts, said Takenaka, who as economic minister battled Japan’s domestic banking crisis in the late 1990s.

Rising defaults by China’s state firms are showing the need for bond investors to be much savvier about those borrowers -- no easy feat in a country where government decisions and business operations lack transparency, Bloomberg News reported. Five state-linked companies -- from a coal miner to a top chipmaker and an auto firm with ties to BMW AG -- have defaulted for the first time in the onshore bond market this year. That’s the most since 2016.