South Korea’s Hyundai Merchant Marine is getting another $5 billion in state funding to finance a series of new orders for megaships as the company tries to compete with bigger Asian and European rivals in a difficult container shipping market. HMM, the country’s de facto flag carrier after the collapse of Hanjin Shipping Co. in 2016, will spend $2.8 billion to buy 20 large container vessels from South Korean shipbuilders, The Wall Street Journal reported. The rest of the money will likely be used to buy container terminals, according to people involved in the matter.

China plans to increase the number of companies it deems systemically important financial institutions, people familiar with the matter said, a sign that policy makers are stepping up crisis-prevention efforts as the nation’s debt burden swells to unprecedented levels, Bloomberg News reported. Regulators led by China’s central bank will initially shortlist at least 50 of the country’s largest lenders, insurers and brokerages as possible SIFIs, said the people, asking not to be identified because the matter is private.

The Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) has narrowed on five arms of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) that may have been involved in fund diversion and mismanagement, the Economic Times reported on Wednesday. Indian government took control of the debt-laden IL&FS last week after defaults on a string of debt obligations triggered wider concerns about risks in the country’s financial sector, Reuters reported.

Chinese corporate bond defaults will likely continue to rise next year due to daunting refinancing costs, with defaults expected to concentrate on the country’s cash-starved private sector, Fitch Ratings said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Availability of credit for firms to refinance their borrowings remains tight despite the central bank’s monetary policy easing steps, as commercial banks continue to be cautious in lending to private companies and non-strategic, financially wobbly state-owned enterprises (SOEs), Fitch said.

Sri Lanka plans to put two state-owned hotel companies up for sale within the next six months in a sale that could raise $500 million for the island nation as it seeks to bolster its finances, the finance minister said on Tuesday. Sri Lanka faces repayments on expensive infrastructure foreign loans starting this year and already has a hefty debt burden, while its rupee currency has plumbed record lows, Reuters reported. “We’re going through the legal hoops of preparing (the sales),” State Minister of Finance Eran Wickramaratne said in an interview.

Chinese conglomerate HNA Group has put up for sale property assets worth at least $11 billion, according to documents seen by Reuters, accelerating a push to cut its large debt and restructure, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Two sets of documents reviewed by Reuters listed more than 80 assets that HNA has either put up for sale or intends to sell, including hotels, commercial and residential buildings. They are mostly within China, with the bulk of them located in Hainan Island, where HNA is headquartered.

Top lender State Bank of India said on Tuesday it is stepping up its target to buy “good quality” asset portfolios from non-banking financial companies (NBFC), Reuters reported. India’s NBFC sector has been in the spotlight after IL&FS, a major infrastructure financing and construction company, defaulted on a string of debt obligations in recent weeks triggering wider concerns about risks in the country’s financial sector. SBI said it believes that there is a “good opportunity” to expand its loan portfolio at “attractive rates”.

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Jim Leaviss of Bond Vigilantes has dug out his missives in the months before Lehman Brothers imploded in 2008, and found some ominous similarities, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. The market was obsessing about oil prices, then on their way to $140 a barrel, while the European Central Bank was tightening monetary policy. All that is needed for a hat-trick today, says Mr Leaviss, is a “credit accident”, and for good measure, he notes that the biggest difference between then and now is the level of debt.

Investors in Indian equity funds held tight and even bought more last month, seemingly unfazed by the selloff triggered by a tumbling currency and a crisis at a troubled lender, Bloomberg News reported. Stock funds took in 111 billion rupees ($1.5 billion) in September, the most since May, up from 83 billion rupees in August, data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India show.