It’s never been easy to figure out where China’s government ends and the private sector begins, but the dividing line is getting increasingly blurry as the nation’s stock market sinks, Bloomberg News reported. At least 47 non-state companies in China have disclosed plans to sell stakes to government-backed investors in 2018, company filings compiled by Bloomberg show. The pace of such deals accelerated in recent months as the country’s $3.2 trillion equity rout squeezed company founders who pledged their stakes as collateral for loans.

Australia’s big banks are set for their worst earnings season since the global financial crisis. A softening housing market, margin pressure from rising funding costs, and the ballooning cost of dealing with the fallout from an inquiry into misconduct in the financial industry, are all squeezing profits, Bloomberg News reported. Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. and National Australia Bank Ltd. are expected to report their first declines in full-year cash profit since 2016, while Westpac Banking Corp.

Noble Group Ltd. warned of another quarterly loss, driven by restructuring and finance costs, as the embattled commodity trader moves toward completing a $3.5 billion rescue deal that’ll hand control to creditors, Bloomberg News reported. The net loss for the three months to September will be $90 million to $115 million, according to a filing on Monday. It expects to incur restructuring costs of about $35 million, after spending more than $100 million in the first half. Once Asia’s largest commodity trader, Noble Group’s crisis has escalated in recent years as losses and defaults mounted.

Long-simmering discord between the Indian central bank and the government is turning into a very public brawl, a Bloomberg View reported. The timing couldn’t be more awful for markets. In a hard-hitting speech Friday on central-bank independence, Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor Viral Acharya startled his audience by invoking Argentina of 2010. Back then, the Argentine central bank chief quit after being coerced to hand over a part of its reserves to the government, causing panic in the markets.

Indian billionaire Ajay Piramal’s home finance firm is set to tap overseas markets for funds, as hurdles mount for such non-bank lenders to raise money at home after landmark defaults by IL&FS group, Bloomberg News reported. The tycoon’s Piramal Capital & Housing Finance, which provides services including mortgages to individuals and real estate financing, is firming up plans to raise "sufficient capital" through external commercial borrowings and bond markets.

In a sign of a mounting policy struggle between India’s central bank and the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a top bank official warned on Friday that undermining a central bank’s independence could be “potentially catastrophic,” Reuters reported. The comments by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor Viral Acharya showed that the central bank is pushing back hard against government pressure to relax its policies and reduce its powers ahead of a general election due by next May, and as Indian financial markets have been dropping in recent weeks.

Chinese equities have already lost $3 trillion in market value since January, and hopes for better days ahead are fading, Bloomberg News reported. Anyone counting on a breather in this year’s final stretch got slapped with another 7.9 percent drop for the Shanghai Composite Index so far in October. That sets the gauge up for one of its worst annual performances ever, behind a 65 percent meltdown at the height of the global financial crisis in 2008, and nearing the 22 percent slumps seen in 2011 and 1994. China ranks among the world’s worst places to own shares in 2018.

China’s economic growth continued to slow in October, a period in which the trade conflict with the U.S. has intensified and policy makers have stepped up support for businesses, Bloomberg News reported. That’s the signal from a Bloomberg Economics gauge aggregating the earliest-available indicators on business conditions and market sentiment. The government effort to stabilize the mood among executives and investors hasn’t been effective yet.

Creditors of India’s bankrupt Essar Steel have accepted an offer from ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant said on Friday, in a major step towards its efforts to establish a meaningful presence in India, the Financial Times reported. The announcement came a day after Essar’s founding Ruia family offered to pay off the company’s entire outstanding debt of Rs543bn ($7.4bn), in a last-ditch attempt to pull the company out of the insolvency proceedings and halt the sale by creditors.

Turkey’s central bank is readying itself for a key policy meeting on Thursday that could disrupt the fragile stability of the country’s currency following months of turbulence, the Financial Times reported. While the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey is expected to follow up September’s dramatic interest rate rise — when it hiked the benchmark lending rate by 6.25 percentage points to stem a developing lira crisis — by keeping rates on hold, the meeting is nonetheless a test of the bank’s credibility.