Policymakers in China trimmed a key benchmark lending rate for the first time in more than three years amid a protracted slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy, prompting local stocks to nudge higher and bond yields to fall, the Financial Times reported. The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was lowering the interest for the one-year medium-term lending facility by five basis points to 3.25 per cent, the first time it has cut since early 2016. It did not provide a reason for cutting the MLF.

Dagong, one of China’s biggest debt-rating agencies, said on Monday that it resumed its ratings business this month, after the operation was frozen for a year and after a shareholding restructuring that brought the company under state control, Reuters reported. “The company has fully restored credit rating business for non-financial corporate debt financing instruments in the interbank market, and securities credit rating business, since November,” Dagong said in a statement on its website www.dagongcredit.com.

SoftBank is tightening governance at companies it backs as the Japanese conglomerate and its $97bn investment powerhouse try to limit the outsized control of start-up founders and restore confidence in their bets following the near collapse of WeWork, the Financial Times reported. The Tokyo-based group is expected to outline tougher governance standards and restrictions on dual-class share structures on Wednesday as it takes a multibillion-dollar writedown because of bad bets on investments such as the US-based office-sharing group, said people briefed on the plan.

Turkish regulators and bankers are meeting this week to try to hammer out a regulatory tweak that would make it easier for foreign investors to buy some of the tens of billions of dollars worth of soured loans left over from last year’s crisis., Reuters reported. According to five people familiar with the effort, the BDDK banking watchdog and Capital Markets Board aim to draft changes that could remove the last hurdle to Turkish banks selling non-performing loans (NPLs) to hungry foreign buyers.

It started with an unverified rumor from an obscure social media account: Yichuan Rural Commercial Bank was insolvent. Within hours of the post on Tuesday, more than 1,000 worried customers had lined up to withdraw their money, Bloomberg News reported. By Wednesday, a run on the bank had prompted local authorities to arrange more than 30 billion yuan ($4.3 billion) of liquidity injections. As branch staff sought to restore confidence, they displayed stacks of cash to convince depositors that there was enough to go around.

The finance industry is in turmoil. Tax collections have hit stall speed. India’s credit and fiscal crises are joined at the hip. Consider the $13 billion in past fees that the government is asking from telecom operators, a Bloomberg View reported. It’s a desperate attempt to squeeze money from an industry in which most players have already vanished or gone bankrupt. The two old firms that are still standing amid intense price competition from newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. will bear the brunt of the recently court-approved demand. Among them, Vodafone Idea Ltd.

China’s Fosun Tourism Group said on Friday it would acquire the Thomas Cook and related hotel brands for 11 million pounds ($14.25 million), in a bid to expand its presence in the tourism business, Reuters reported. The assets include trademarks, domain names, software applications and licenses of the British travel firm and related hotel brands, Hong Kong-listed Fosun said, adding that it did not plan to buy overseas assets or businesses related to Thomas Cook for the time being.

Chinese conglomerate Fosun is close to acquiring Thomas Cook’s brand and its intellectual property assets, which could allow the business to be revived again as an online travel agent just months after collapsing into administration, the Financial Times reported. The deal to acquire the Thomas Cook assets could be announced as soon as this week, said two people briefed on the situation, although they cautioned that the deal had not been finalised. A number of other groups have been bidding, including rival travel agency, Tui.

When Arun Sarin, Vodafone Group Plc’s India-born former CEO, was charting the British telecommunications firm’s expansion into emerging markets in the mid-2000s, his home country with more than a billion potential phone users seemed a compelling choice. Sarin wasn’t alone. Norway’s Telenor ASA, Russia’s Mobile TeleSystems PJSC and Malaysia’s Maxis Bhd were also among a slew of companies that flocked to this fast-growing market, Bloomberg News reported. The carriers banded with local partners, bid for airwaves and licenses, spending billions of dollars to prepare their networks.

The government in India has pumped $37 billion into ailing banks in the past three years. Lenders have been forced into mergers, and the central bank has wrested more than a dozen companies from the control of tycoons who defaulted on their debt, Bloomberg News reported. But cleaning up the financial system has been like playing whack-a-mole. India’s banks still sit on the biggest pile of bad loans, relative to total loans, among the major economies. They’re about 9% of debts.