Asia Pacific

The Bank of Japan surprised the market on Tuesday by doubling incentives designed to spur bank lending, weakening the yen and lifting Tokyo stocks at a time when the nation's economy is showing signs of trouble, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the hope that it will open the spigot for lending to the broader economy, the central bank said it will expand two programs where it offers fixed-rate loans at rock-bottom interest rates to commercial banks.

China’s central bank has drained Rmb48bn ($7.9bn) from money markets, an unexpected move that signals its concern with the boom in lending at the start of the year, the Financial Times reported. The People’s Bank of China withdrew the cash by issuing 14-day bond repurchase agreements. It was its first time using repos to drain liquidity from the money market in eight months. The central bank typically gauges demand from banks the day before conducting open-market operations, but on this occasion it issued the repos without advance warning, traders said.

China's Wanxiang Group won court approval Tuesday to take over failed luxury hybrid-car maker Fisker Automotive Inc. after successfully outbidding Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li in an auction, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Li's takeover vehicle, Hybrid Tech Holdings, signaled it would move to collect most of the $149.2 million Wanxiang is paying, exercising its rights as Fisker's senior secured lender to trump the claims of Fisker's unpaid suppliers. Judge Kevin Gross approved the sale of Fisker's assets to Wanxiang at a hearing in the U.S.

A high-yield investment product backed by a loan to a debt-ridden coal company failed to repay investors when it matured last Friday, state media reported on Wednesday, in the latest sign of financial stress in China's shadow bank sector, Reuters reported. The product, which raised 289 million yuan ($47.7 million) from wealthy clients of China Construction Bank (CCB) , China's second-largest lender, was created by Jilin Province Trust Co Ltd and backed by a loan to a coal company, Shanxi Liansheng Energy Co Ltd. "It matured on Feb.

Australia’s unemployment rate climbed to the highest in more than 10 years in January, spurring traders to pare bets on an interest-rate increase and sending the Aussie to its biggest drop in almost three weeks. The jobless rate rose to 6 percent from 5.8 percent, the statistics bureau said in Sydney. The median estimate was an increase to 5.9 percent in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. The number of people employed fell by 3,700. International carmakers Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co.

Cyprus's economic restructuring programme is on target, with fiscal targets for 2013 performing better than expected, but the outlook remains challenging, international lenders said Tuesday. The assessment was made by the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund after their latest review of the programme, agreed with Cyprus last March in exchange for a 10 billion euro ($13.6 billion) bailout, Global Post reported on an Agence France-Presse story.

Sounding warnings that could have been made 20 or even 30 years ago, one of China’s most renowned economists said the country’s economy faces a “very difficult” year as it continues confronting a host of problems that have intensified over the past decade, the International New York Times Sinosphere blog reported.

Insolvency firm Ferrier Hodgson has been appointed as voluntary administrator by the board of bankrupt contractor Forge Group, sources close to the situation told The Australian Financial Review's Street Talk. The next step is that lender ANZ Banking Group will take control by appointing KordaMentha as receiver. ANZ extended Forge an additional $11 million line of credit in the past fortnight, which was being used to pay Forge employees and for other working capital expenses.

China pledged Friday to create a unified pension system to boost consumption and encourage labor mobility, a step toward empowering its vast rural poor, The Wall Street Journal reported. China's State Council, or cabinet, said it planned to create a unified pension system for residents in both rural and urban areas. Funding would come from contributions from individuals, the central government, local governments and social institutions, the State Council said on the central government's website.

Chinese households’ concentration of wealth in real estate is magnifying the danger to the world’s second-largest economy of any property bust, as the nation grapples with the consequences of its record credit surge, Bloomberg News reported. Some 66.1 percent of family assets were in housing in 2013, a national survey of about 28,000 households shows. Mortgage debt as a share of disposable income rose to 30 percent from 18 percent in 2008, according to estimates by Nicholas Lardy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.