Asia Pacific

Migrant workers are the unsung heroes of China’s economic miracle. Numbering more than 270 million, they abandon their impoverished farms and villages to move to the cities, where they run the factories and build the highways and high-rises that have made China’s growth the envy of the world, the International New York Times reported. Now, as China’s economy slows, the country’s leaders have a new mission for them: Buy homes. China is looking for ways to get migrant workers to help buy up a huge glut of unsold homes that is dragging down the country’s economic growth.

Japan's Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp will press hard to approve a capital increase for Brazilian steelmaker Usiminas SA this week, with a threat to sue if fellow shareholders block the motion, a source with knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday. The Japanese group will propose a cash injection of 1 billion reais ($267 million) at a Friday board meeting, and is willing to finance the capital increase alone if the other major shareholder, Italian-Argentinian conglomerate Techint Group, refuses to participate, the same source said.

China’s central government will take over some of local authorities’ debts in a move to help them regain footing and to allow Beijing to cut business taxes, The Wall Street Journal reported. Key to the Chinese leadership’s economic agenda this year is to slash taxes and debt loads for companies, leaving firms with more funds to invest and innovate as Beijing looks to entrepreneurs to help drive growth. But lowering taxes has long been a difficult pill for local officials to swallow, since they see spending-induced growth as crucial to their survival.

The head of China’s top economic-planning agency Sunday rejected suggestions the Chinese slowdown was dragging on global growth and markets, saying the world’s second largest economy continues to be a source of demand and vitality, The Wall Street Journal reported. National Development and Reform Commission chief Xu Shaoshi cited the 6.9% growth the economy clocked last year and the high volume of commodities it is importing as among the contributions China is making to global economic health. Even as the government is lowering its growth target for the slowing economy, Mr.

In a rare piece of good news for the crisis-racked European Union, Cyprus is about to finish its financial bailout, leaving neighboring Greece as the only country in the eurozone that still needs rescue loans, The Wall Street Journal reported. Eurozone finance ministers are expected to announce on Monday that Cyprus will exit its €10 billion ($11 billion) program on March 23, according to Cypriot officials.

It looks like subprime derivatives on steroids: China hopes to bundle together billions of dollars’ worth of non-performing loans and eventually sell them to global investors, the Financial Times reported. Such a massive securitisation programme would represent the latest tactic in China’s campaign to lift one of the biggest shadows cast over its slowing economy — a debt pile that is as big as 230 per cent of GDP. It would whittle back debts at Chinese banks and move some of the risk outside the domestic financial system.

The proposed sale of a state-owned iron-ore port in Australia illustrates how quickly the slump in commodity prices has ground down the hopes that once accompanied the country’s resources boom, The Wall Street Journal reported. The lower house of Western Australia’s legislature last week approved plans to sell a long-term lease over the Utah Point port in the state’s Pilbara iron-ore mining region.

Moody’s, the ratings agency, has cut its outlook on China’s government credit to ‘negative’ from ‘stable’ on the back of a growing debt burden in the world’s second largest economy, and the challenges of reform, the Irish Times reported. In a report issued days before China’s leaders gather to approve the latest Five-Year Plan for the economy at the National People’s Congress, Moody’s uncertainty about Beijing’s capacity to implement widescale reforms to address imbalances in the economy.

Japan, the world’s most heavily indebted nation, is now getting paid to borrow. The Japanese government for the first time Tuesday issued benchmark 10-year bonds with negative yields, meaning it is effectively charging investors for the privilege of lending it money, The Wall Street Journal reported. That is the result of the topsy-turvy world of negative interest rates, which Japan entered earlier this year, when the country’s central bank began to charge lenders for holding some of their deposits, instead of paying them interest.

The Chinese central bank, says Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan, is “neither a god nor a magician.” He was responding, in a written interview published by financial magazine Caixin, to complaints that Chinese financial authorities lack the communications skills needed to calm international investors. After months of silence while global markets went into convulsions over uncertainty about China’s currency policies, Mr. Zhou said, “There is no way we can wipe out all uncertainties.” The defensiveness is understandable. Here’s the problem: Mr.