China will cut the reserve requirement ratio and improve funding conditions this month, as liquidity tightens toward the Spring Festival holidays, the country’s largest securities firm says, Bloomberg News reported. Fresh demand for funds will amount to nearly 4.3 trillion yuan ($625 billion) in January, according to Citic Securities Co. and Bloomberg calculations. Mainland residents will withdraw 1 trillion yuan of cash in preparation for the holiday, when money is gifted in red envelopes.

Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd. faces losing its entire investment of almost $150 million in a key urban redevelopment project, underscoring the vagaries in China’s property market, Bloomberg News reported. The Shenzhen-based home builder, which gained notoriety in 2015 when it became the first developer from the nation to default on U.S. dollar debt, has invested more than 1 billion yuan ($146 million) in a project in Xi’an to transform a shanty town into residential dwellings.

A new year, a new central bank governor. Yet the first salvo to come out of the Reserve Bank of India’s policy arsenal in 2019 is encouragement of good old “extend and pretend” lending, a Bloomberg View reported. Banks and shadow banks are being allowed a one-time restructuring of loans of up to 250 million rupees ($3.6 million) to micro, small and medium enterprises that were in default on Jan. 1, without having to mark them as nonperforming, the RBI said on Tuesday. Lenders are being given an extension of 15 months (up to March 31, 2020) to pretend that these stressed loans are standard.

India’s central bank will permit lenders to restructure stressed loans to small companies, breaking from a five-year-old policy of eschewing sweeping corporate debt overhauls, Bloomberg News reported. The Reserve Bank of India will allow one-time restructuring of loans to micro, small and medium-sized companies that are in default, the regulator said in a statement on Tuesday. To be eligible for the program, the loan should not exceed 250 million rupees ($3.6 million), according to the statement.

India’s central bank on Monday said the proportion of commercial lenders’ non-performing assets (NPAs) may fall slightly to 10.3 percent by March, thanks to measures including the creation of a bankruptcy code, Reuters reported. In June, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had said commercial lenders’ ratio for gross bad loans might even increase to 12.2 percent by March 2019, but they had fallen to 10.8 percent by end-September and now look to dip lower still.

Chinese electric vehicle developer Faraday Future said on Monday it signed a new restructuring agreement with a unit of its main investor, Evergrande Health Industry Group Ltd, ending a bitter legal fight and clearing the path for raising funds, Reuters reported. Season Smart, which agreed to be bought by China’s Evergrande Health, will now own 32 percent preference shares, down from a previous 45 percent, according to filings.

All politics is local, runs the old saw. In China, local governments lie at the root of the country’s debt problem—a problem likely only to grow in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported. Most analysts see the Chinese government’s relatively low debt—equivalent to around 16% of GDP at the end of 2017, according to Moody’s—as a strength. But add in both official local government debt, and debt issued by off-balance sheet financing vehicles backed by local governments—known as LGFVs—and that ratio climbs to 60% of GDP.

Tokyo District Court said on Monday it has extended the detention of ousted Nissan Motor chairman Carlos Ghosn until January 11th, The Irish Times reported. Mr Ghosn, accused of aggravated breach of trust, is facing allegations of making the car maker shoulder 1.85 billion yen (€14.6 million) in personal investment losses. The latest extension will see Ghosn remain in Tokyo’s main detention centre, where he has been confined since his first arrest on November 19th on allegations of financial misconduct.

Turkey is facing a mounting number of applications for bankruptcy protection as a slump in economic growth takes its toll on business, the Financial Times reported.

Indian power companies spent much of the past decade rushing to build coal-fired power plants in anticipation of surging electricity demand as economic growth took off. Now, many of those projects are mired in deep financial distress and private investment in coal power has ground to a near halt, the Financial Times reported. The sector has been hit by a host of problems: many plants have struggled to secure fuel supplies, and to clinch deals to sell their power to cash-strapped state distribution companies.