The turmoil in India’s non-bank finance companies is deepening, with a troubled lender disclosing further missed debt payments late on Friday and panic seeping into what has been Asia’s best-performing stock market, Bloomberg News reported. The benchmark equity index had its wildest intraday move in more than four years before closing with a 0.8 percent loss on Friday as investors remained jittery about the nation’s financial shares after a recent default by Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd. A measure of investor anxiety surged to its highest level in more than four months.
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Resources Per Country
- Afghanistan
- Armenia
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- Azerbaijan
- Bangladesh
- Bhutan
- Brunei
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- China
- Cook Islands
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- Hong Kong
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- New Zealand
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- Taiwan
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- Turkmenistan
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- Vietnam
Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd., an Indian conglomerate that has missed payment on more than five of its obligations since August, is seeking to raise more than 300 billion rupees ($4.2 billion) selling assets to cut debt, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg.
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When Chinese businessman Yuan Yafei met British Prime Minister Theresa May in Shanghai this February, he vowed to keep pushing for further economic collaboration between China and the U.K., where his Sanpower Group owned the 169-year-old department-store chain, House of Fraser. But only six weeks later, Yuan’s group was pulling back from the U.K., beginning a months-long bid to sell the retailer that had been battered by online rivals, a weakening pound and mounting costs, Bloomberg News reported.
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One of India’s most acquisitive companies is buying up cement kilns across the country, going from big to bigger. It’s got the right plan, but who’s buying the cement and actually building? Ultratech Cement Ltd. is one of the world’s biggest cement manufacturers, with the capacity to put out 90 million tons a year from plants sprinkled across India, Bloomberg News reported. It purchased distressed assets from Jaiprakash Associates Ltd. and is battling to buy even more out of bankruptcy. Ultratech is taking a smart tack in India’s fragmented cement industry: consolidation.
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Indian billionaire Rana Kapoor is being forced from the helm of Yes Bank, the lender he has led since founding it in 2004, as regulators tighten their oversight of the Indian financial sector, the Financial Times reported. The board of Yes Bank, the country’s fourth-largest private-sector bank by assets, had proposed that Mr Kapoor’s term as chief be extended until the end of August 2021. But the Reserve Bank of India has decided that Mr Kapoor, 61, may stay only until the end of January 2019, Yes Bank said in a stock exchange announcement, without giving further details.
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Turkey’s finance minister tried to rebuild shattered market confidence in his government’s ability to manage the economy by promising to cut public spending by nearly $10bn in a sweeping austerity programme that would put the brakes on growth, the Financial Times reported. The announcement by Berat Albayrak, who was put in charge of the economy two months ago by his father-in-law, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, comes just a week after a surprise decision by the central bank to sharply raise interest rates in the face of a mounting currency crisis.
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Lenders to India’s power industry are scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss ways to resolve 1.4 trillion rupees ($19.2 billion) of stressed assets that’s hobbling the sector, people with knowledge of the matter said. The meeting will be hosted in New Delhi by Power Finance Corp., a state-owned firm that lends to the country’s electricity generators, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public, Bloomberg News reported. Representatives from the finance and power ministries, and Rural Electrification Corp.
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Turkey’s banks agreed on Wednesday to help companies struggling with debt as the country’s finance minister prepared to set out a plan seen as critical to limiting the fallout from a currency crisis, the Financial Times reported. The Banks Association of Turkey said the nation’s lenders would strive to accommodate companies that needed a temporary reprieve on loan repayments because of “a temporary disruption of the balance between income and expenditure”.
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South Korea’s central bank warned on Thursday that household debt was growing much faster than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average as large mortgages and high rents drive up indebtedness, Reuters reported. “Since the end of the global financial crisis, South Korea’s household debt growth has significantly exceeded that of the OECD, and the trend will continue,” the Bank of Korea (BOK) said in a financial stability report.
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China’s HNA Group is in talks with banks to find a buyer for its CWT logistics firm just nine months after acquiring the Singaporean company in a $1 billion deal, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The sale, if completed, would be the latest in a series of divestments aimed at slashing debt at the aviation-to-financial services conglomerate that is restructuring its far-flung operations, Reuters reported.
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