Essar Steel India sought a liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargo on an online trading platform this week, three industry sources said on Thursday, Reuters reported. The company, a unit of Indian commodity conglomerate Essar Group, was seeking a cargo on a delivered ex-ship (DES) basis for delivery into Dahej over Dec. 28-29, the sources said. It sought a cargo through LNG trading marketplace Global LNG Exchange (GLX) on Wednesday but did not attract any offers, one of the sources said.

A leading Turkish carpet maker whose rugs adorn the floors of Istanbul’s luxury hotels and the region’s biggest mosque has filed for bankruptcy, Ahval reported. Avşar Halı was awarded bankruptcy protection by a court in Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey, the city where it is based, Sözcü newspaper reported on Wednesday. The firm has supplied carpets to five-star hotels in Istanbul such as the Ritz Carlton, Shangri-La Bosporus and the Hilton. Its rugs also furnish the floors of Çamlıca Mosque, the largest in Asia Minor, which opened in 2016.

Toshiba is set to liquidate UK nuclear arm NuGen, according to people familiar with the company, dealing a hammer blow to plans to build a new plant at Moorside in Cumbria. The Japanese conglomerate, whose board is meeting on Thursday, is almost certain to take the decision to wind up NuGen after all avenues to sell the unit were exhausted, the Financial Times reported. “It is 80 per cent likely that Toshiba will decide at the board meeting to wind it up,” a source close to NuGen told the Financial Times.

In the span of just 11 months, China went from having no distressed dollar-denominated corporate bonds to having more than any other emerging market, Bloomberg News reported. The world’s second-biggest economy has 15 bonds whose option-adjusted spreads over U.S. Treasuries were above 1,000 basis points as of Nov. 6, according to a Bloomberg Barclays index. That’s more than all the other nations combined. An ongoing trade war and slower economic growth after years of breakneck expansion are straining the nation’s highly-leveraged corporate sector.

Chinese brokerages are boosting capital to protect against a market plunge that threatens the value of $640 billion worth of shares pledged as collateral. Securities firms have extended more than a third of China’s stock-backed loans, which may go sour and force lenders to offload the shares, Bloomberg News reported. To cushion themselves, at least three of the country’s biggest brokerages have announced capital raising plans in recent months, joining the nation’s big banks in strengthening buffers.

A rescue plan drawn up by Turkey’s Ministry of Treasury and Finance would allow construction and real estate companies to offload unsold stock while channeling most proceeds toward repaying the country’s wobbly banks, Bloomberg News reported. Two associations of Turkish builders, known as Inder and Gyoder, have asked members to present an inventory of unsold real estate to a government-backed property investment trust Emlak Konut.

A top Indian government official on Monday said the nation’s non-banking housing finance companies were facing liquidity stress, in comments that are likely to put more pressure on the Indian central bank to ease its policy towards the sector, Reuters reported. The intervention by Corporate Affairs Secretary Injeti Srinivas came after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and other government officials raised the issue of a liquidity crunch at a meeting with Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Governor Urjit Patel and other regulators last week.

Chinese stocks are among the world’s worst performers this year. An economy that’s growing at its slowest pace since 2009 and the U.S.-China trade war are certainly dragging them down, but there’s an even bigger problem: The private sector—businesses not owned or controlled by the state—is broke, Bloomberg News reported. The government has initiated programs to keep businesses afloat, but they’re unlikely to be enough. The cash crunch is a side effect of Beijing’s recent attempts to curb risky financial behaviors.

Real estate price growth is slowing and bond defaults are rising, but this isn’t the time to short China’s big property companies. China Evergrande Group, the short sellers’ favorite punt until they were burned by a rebound, is now back in their sights, a Bloomberg View reported. The developer’s shares are down 37 percent from an October 2017 peak, and its dollar bonds are just coming off record lows. But a groaning debt load doesn’t tell the whole story.

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said on Monday the central bank was aware that prolonged ultra-loose monetary policy could squeeze financial institutions' margins and potentially destabilize the country's banking system, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Given subdued inflation and uncertainty surrounding overseas economies, however, he said the BOJ needed to maintain its massive stimulus programme while keeping a watchful eye on the merits and costs of its policy.