Asia Pacific

Singapore said banks with a “significant retail presence” in the city-state will soon be required to maintain some liquid assets in the country to support their short-term cash outflows, Bloomberg News reported. The new liquidity framework applies to all currencies, and banks also need to hold liquid Singapore dollar assets separately to manage their liabilities in the local currency, Lim Hng Kiang, the deputy chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, or MAS, said in a speech last night.

China has signalled it will resist calls for aggressive measures to prop up its flagging property market, even as house prices continue to drop, the Financial Times reported. People’s Daily, the Communist party’s main mouthpiece, said in a commentary on Monday that the property market was in a “normal adjustment period” and accused domestic developers, speculators and foreign banks of exaggerating the slowdown in order to put pressure on authorities to adopt heavy-handed stimulus policies.

The major shareholder of the South Korean operator of the ferry on which hundreds of high school students drowned in April has applied for receivership, a court said on Monday, Reuters reported. Chonhaiji Co Ltd, a ship block maker and the major shareholder of ferry operator Chonghaejin Marine Company, lodged its application at the Changwon District Court last week, a court official said. Chonghaejin Marine owned the Sewol, which sank on April 16 on a routine journey between the mainland port of Incheon and the holiday island of Jeju.

Major Chinese banks want to manage their own bad debts, attracted by the outsize profits being earned by recovery firms, in a sign of confidence that investments in internal risk assessment teams are set to pay off, Reuters reported. If they are right, it may mark the end of a buyer's market for a distressed debt pile that has topped $100 billion (58.78 billion pounds), benefiting bank shareholders at the expense of asset-management companies such as China Cinda Asset Management Co.

Mt. Gox Co., once the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, won approval of its U.S. bankruptcy filing, giving a boost to a Japanese investigation into the disappearance of 650,000 units of the digital currency, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey G. Jernigan said today in Dallas she has “ample legal authority” to accept the U.S. filing and recognize Mt. Gox’s Japanese bankruptcy as the foreign main proceeding. The ruling empowers the company’s Japanese trustee to examine witnesses, gather and review evidence, and oversee assets in the U.S., such as servers.

As President Xi Jinping of China prepares to tackle what may be the biggest cases of official corruption in more than six decades of Communist Party rule, new evidence suggests that he has been pushing his own family to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, reducing his own political vulnerability, the International New York Times reported. No investment stakes have been tied directly to Mr. Xi or his wife and daughter.

The cost of insuring against global bank defaults has plunged to its lowest level since the financial crisis in a sign that investors are willing to bet the industry has become safer, the Financial Times reported. Buyers of bank debt often purchase “credit default swaps,” a type of derivative that helps insure their investments against a default. The price they are paying for that protection is now the lowest since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “We’ve gone back to pre-crisis levels,” said Brian Monteleone, analyst at Barclays.

Japanese consumer lender Aiful Corp said on Friday its creditors had agreed with the company's plans to restructure 52.7 billion yen ($517.22 million) of the company's total 162 billion yen in debt, Reuters reported. Aiful will repay the rest of the debt by taking out other loans and will buy back debt from creditors. Conditions on the buybacks were not disclosed, but the company said it will exchange outstanding debt for newly issued bonds that will pay 8 percent and mature in 2020.

Competition to acquire the French energy equipment maker Alstom was expected to intensify on Monday, as Siemens of Germany and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan were said to be preparing to make a joint offer that could pressure General Electric to improve its $13.5 billion bid, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. G.E.’s bid for Alstom’s power generation and transmission business, made in April, has been opposed by French government officials even though Alstom’s board approved the deal.

China’s home buyers are being offered no-money-down purchases in an echo of the subprime lending that triggered a U.S. economic meltdown and the global financial crisis, Bloomberg News reported. Deals skirting government requirements for minimum 30 percent down payments have emerged this year from Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the south to Beijing in the north as real-estate sales slump, according to state media and statements by government agencies and developers.