The favored funding source of China’s real-estate developers is under scrutiny in one of the country’s largest urban areas, posing a threat to a sector that has stretched creative financing to its limits, the Wall Street Journal reported. On Friday, the city of Xi’an in central China opened a consultation process on instituting an escrow system that would ensure developers hold on to funds worth 1.2 times the cost of building a new property when booking a presale.
Resources Per Country
- Afghanistan
- Armenia
- Australia
- Azerbaijan
- Bangladesh
- Bhutan
- Brunei
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- China
- Cook Islands
- Cyprus
- Fiji
- Georgia
- Hong Kong
- India
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- Japan
- Kazakhstan
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- Laos
- Macau
- Malaysia
- Maldives
- Micronesia
- Mongolia
- Myanmar
- Nepal
- New Zealand
- North Korea
- Pakistan
- Papua New Guinea
- Philippines
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- South Korea
- Sri Lanka
- Taiwan
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- Thailand
- Turkey
- Turkmenistan
- Uzbekistan
- Vanuatu
- Vietnam
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China has made developing its own chip industry a matter of patriotic pride. It helps that “China chip” and “China heart” sound the same in the local language. The strain of this 1.7 trillion yuan ($243 billion) endeavor may be too much for the debt-clogged arteries of its municipal governments, though, according to a Bloomberg News commentary. Over the past decade, Beijing hasn’t hesitated to deploy its fiscal might in pursuit of economic and social objectives.
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Global automakers may face another potentially huge air-bag recall as the U.S. transport regulator evaluates the long-term safety of inflators made by bankrupt supplier Takata Corp., Bloomberg News reported. The manufacturer, now owned by China’s Ningbo Joyson Electronic Corp., faces a Dec. 31 deadline to show the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that as many as 100 million inflators containing a chemical drying agent will be safe long-term.
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A commodity trader has become China’s first state-owned enterprise to inflict losses on dollar bondholders in two decades, according to S&P Global Ratings, a new landmark in a rising wave of defaults, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chinese authorities are allowing more companies to renege on their debts, where once they would have found ways to engineer bailouts. So far defaults have mostly been concentrated in credit-starved private companies, but even some groups with state backing are now failing to repay creditors as promised.
Moody’s Investors Service said funding challenges at India’s non-bank financing companies are increasing the risk of asset quality deterioration at banks, which are already saddled with the world’s worst bad-debt pile, Bloomberg News reported. Risks of loan losses at shadow financiers will weaken their financials, prompting banks to further reduce lending to them and worsening their funding stress, the ratings company said in a report dated Friday.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed off on a phase-one trade deal with China, averting the Dec. 15 introduction of a new wave of U.S. tariffs on about $160 billion of consumer goods from the Asian nation, Bloomberg News reported. The deal presented to Trump by trade advisers yesterday included a promise by the Chinese to buy more U.S. agricultural goods, according to the people. Officials also discussed possible reductions of existing duties on Chinese products, they said. The terms have been agreed but the legal text has not yet been finalized, the people said.
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A bankruptcy court has admitted an insolvency resolution plea filed by Bank of Baroda against Mumbai-based Genesis Resorts, which defaulted on loans of about Rs 230 crore, The Economic Times reported. The division bench of judicial member Bhaskara Pantula Mohan and technical member Rajesh Sharma restrained the company and its promoters from transferring, encumbering, alienating or disposing of the company’s assets.
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Indonesia has more reason than most to be wary of backsliding on its commitment to budget discipline, Bloomberg News reported. Its deficit ceiling is an important piece of the economic and political architecture that emerged from the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Indonesia experienced more than just a run on the currency, a deep recession and a rescue by the International Monetary Fund. The crunch morphed into riots, communal violence and the overthrow of dictator Suharto, who had ruled with military backing for more than three decades.
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Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today introduced a bill in the Lok Sabha to amend the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, the Times of India reported. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Second Amendment) Bill, 2019 was approved by the Union Cabinet yesterday. The amendments in the law seek to remove bottlenecks and streamline the corporate insolvency resolution process, wherein successful bidders will bering fenced from any risk of criminal proceedings for offenses committed by previous promoters of companies concerned.
China’s companies racked up some towering bills as they expanded, and the world’s investors and lenders rushed to offer them even more money. Now the bills are coming due, and a growing number of Chinese companies can’t pay up, in a sign that the world’s No. 2 economy is feeling the stress from its worst slowdown in nearly three decades, the New York Times reported.