India’s economy grew at a much slower pace than economists expected last quarter, giving the central bank more reason to keep interest rates unchanged this week, Bloomberg News reported. After breaking through the 8 percent mark in the quarter through June, growth eased to 7.1 percent in the three months through September -- lower than almost all the estimates in a Bloomberg survey -- as back-to-back rate hikes in June and August, a funding squeeze and subdued growth in farming put a brake on the world’s fastest-expanding economy.

India’s foreign ministry is investigating claims by expatriates in Ethiopia who say they are being held hostage by local staff that haven’t been paid after the shadow lender Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd. began defaulting on $12.6 billion in debt, Bloomberg News reported. Seven Indian workers from infrastructure financing firm IL&FS, which rocked financial markets after it began missing debt payments in late August, have been detained since Nov.

China is preparing to end its $176 billion experiment with peer-to-peer lending. Alarmed by a surge in defaults, fraud and investor anger, Chinese authorities are planning to wind down small- and medium-sized P2P lending platforms nationwide, people with knowledge of the matter said, Bloomberg News reported. Regulators may also order the largest platforms to cap outstanding loans at current levels and encourage them to reduce lending over time, one of the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations. Shares of P2P platform operators sank in New York.

China’s record year for bond defaults might feature one more superlative before the calendar turns: the first delinquency on an offshore security sold directly by a Chinese company, Bloomberg News reported. While Chinese dollar bonds have typically been issued via overseas units, some companies began direct sales three years ago. Among such issuers is Huachen Energy Co., which failed to make a coupon payment last week on its $500 million dollar bond due in 2020 governed by New York law -- though it has said it will make good on the amount by Dec. 18, within the grace period.

The Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has admitted and initiated insolvency proceedings against Mumbai-based Ariisto Developers and has appointed an interim resolution professional (IRP) to manage the company, The Economic Times reported. NCLT has asked other lenders to file their claims against Ariisto Developers by the first week of December.

An inquiry that has exposed rampant greed and wrongdoing in Australia’s major banks and wealth managers wraps up this week ahead of a final report which could trigger sweeping reform of the financial sector of the world’s 12-largest economy, Reuters reported. Dismissed initially as a “populist whinge” by the ruling conservative party, the quasi-judicial inquiry known as a Royal Commission has revealed branch-to-boardroom misconduct which will almost certainly trigger tougher regulation.

A banking liquidity crunch and weak business sentiment before state elections this year outweighed signs of a revival in consumer demand during India’s main festival season, keeping the outlook for the world’s fastest-growing major economy muted, Bloomberg News reported. An overall activity indicator measuring animal spirits -- a term coined by British economist John Maynard Keynes to refer to investors’ confidence in taking action -- was unchanged in October despite a slew of data from two-wheeler vehicle sales to consumer demand showing an improvement from the previous month.

China’s financing units for local governments, already grappling with bloated debts, now face an even bigger predicament -- a build-up of credit guarantees that leave them vulnerable to surging defaults, Bloomberg News reported. Around 2,000 of these platforms, known as local government financing vehicles, have offered a total of 7 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) of guarantees to loans, bonds and shadow financing for domestic companies, said Lv Pin, an analyst at CITIC Securities Co. That surpasses the tally of LGFVs’ own outstanding local bonds, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

The government is exploring the feasibility of implementing a so-called “pre-packaged” bankruptcy scheme, prevalent in countries like the US, in India to aid the existing insolvency framework and cut costs and time of the resolution process, The Financial Express reported. The planned scheme, if implemented, will be a “pre-IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code) window for the resolution of stressed assets, which will complement the existing framework and not substitute it,” corporate affairs secretary Injeti Srinivas told FE on Monday.

Steelmakers taking control of insolvent plants will result in greater capacity utilisation, triggering a “steep” hike in domestic demand of graphite electrodes, according to Ravi Jhunjhunwala, chairman and managing director of HEG Ltd,  BloombergQuint reported. “A lot of steel plants have changed hands recently and a lot are likely to change hands in the near future,” Jhunjhunwala told BloombergQuint.