Asia Pacific

The arrests or investigations targeting the finance industry in the aftermath of China’s summer market crash have intensified in recent weeks, creating a climate of fear among China’s finance firms and chilling their investment strategies. At least 16 people have been arrested, are being investigated or have been taken away from their job duties to assist authorities, according to statements and announcements compiled by Bloomberg News.

Japan, more than many other developed countries, needs everything to go right for its economy to grow, the International New York Times reported. Its population and work force are shrinking. Once-big industries like consumer electronics are retrenching under pressure from lower-cost rivals. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won power three years ago on a promise to accelerate Japan’s economic metabolism, but despite some notable successes — joblessness is low and many large companies are earning record profits — a broad increase in growth and incomes remains elusive.

Japan has slid back into recession for the fifth time in seven years amid uncertainty about the state of the global economy, putting policymakers under growing pressure to deploy new stimulus measures to support a fragile recovery, The Guardian reported. The world’s third-largest economy shrank an annualised 0.8% in July-September, more than a market forecast for a 0.2% contraction, government data showed on Monday. That followed a revised 0.7% contraction in the previous quarter, fulfilling the technical definition of a recession which is two back-to-back quarterly contractions.

Capital flowed into China last month for the first time since an unexpected currency devaluation in August shook investor confidence in the economy, easing fears over financial stability following an unprecedented bout of outflows, the Financial Times reported. Capital has exited China at a record pace this year as an economic slowdown pushed Chinese gross domestic product growth to its slowest pace in six years.

Cash-strapped China Shanshui Cement has received several demands for repayments from creditors, following a default even as it had started winding up proceedings, it said in a stock exchange filing. The default was on a 2 billion yuan bond which was due on Thursday, about which the company had warned a day before. The company said that China Construction Bank had demanded repayment of a $50 million loan by Thursday failing which it would institute legal proceedings against its subsidiary China Pioneer Cement, which owed the debt.

Kazakhstan’s president certainly caught the imagination of the City of London. In closed-door meetings last week, Nursultan Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials said the commodity-rich central Asian nation would unload hundreds of companies, including its industrial crown jewels, in the most ambitious privatisation drive since its independence from the Soviet Union, the Financial Times reported.

China’s consumers are gradually picking up the baton from the traditional economic engines of manufacturing and real estate, data released on Wednesday show, as the painful rebalancing process inches ahead, the Financial Times reported. The slowdown of factory activity and construction pushed Chinese gross domestic product growth to its lowest annual pace since 2009 in the third quarter at 6.9 per cent, and the latest data suggest these sectors have not yet bottomed out.

China's factory output and investment weakened in October while retail sales growth edged up, suggesting economic growth has stabilized but has yet to revive despite repeated interest rate cuts and other stimulus, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. The data reported Wednesday reflected the two-speed nature of the economy as communist leaders try to encourage growth based on consumer spending instead of trade, investment and heavy industry. Economic growth decelerated to a six-year low of 6.9 percent in the latest quarter.

During an interview last month at the posh Shangri-La Hotel in Hong Kong, Henry Li stepped aside four times in an hour to take calls. Creditors were frantically trying to connect with the chief financial officer of China Shanshui Cement Group Ltd., and they wanted to know one thing: Was his company about to default? "Honestly speaking, banks are very worried about us, as you can tell from the fact that I’ve received many calls,” said Li, sitting alongside Shanshui Chairman Zhang Bin as they discussed the firm’s predicament with Bloomberg on Oct. 14.

South Korea's financial watchdog said Wednesday that it has picked 175 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to be placed under debt restructuring this year as part of government-led efforts to sort out highly indebted firms and prevent their sudden collapse, Yonhap News Agency reported. The number of debt-heavy firms selected for 2015 rose by 50 to 175 this year from a year earlier, with 70 of them given a rating of "C" and the remaining 105 graded a "D," according to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS).