Noble Group Ltd. suspended its shares from trading in Singapore on Friday pending the announcement of a major transaction, with the commodity trader seeking to clinch a sale of its oil-trading unit in a deal that may be critical to the company’s prospects for survival, Bloomberg News reported. The stock was halted at 38 Singapore cents, 2.6 percent lower, after the Hong Kong-based company’s announcement, which was released just after midday in the city-state, and didn’t give details of the planned deal. The shares have sunk 78 percent this year amid concerns that Noble Group will default.

Vitol Group’s negotiations to buy Noble Group Ltd.’s oil trading unit are “very complicated” and may not end in a deal, the chief executive officer of Vitol said, adding to pressure on his Hong Kong-based rival, Bloomberg News reported. The sale of the oil business is crucial to the survival of Noble Group, once Asia’s largest commodity trader. It is rushing to sell the unit in order to pay back about $1 billion of debt under its secured credit facilities, of which the largest matures in mid-January.

China has taken “baby steps” toward cutting leverage as lending from banks slows, but progress has been uneven as borrowing by households and the government has risen, according to S&P Global Ratings. Authorities are adopting both tight and loose policies to try to reduce the country’s dependency on debt without causing a hard landing, analysts led by Christopher Lee wrote in a note dated Oct. 16. S&P last month cut China’s sovereign rating for the first time since 1999, saying it didn’t believe enough was being done to contain credit growth, Bloomberg News reported.

Can financial turmoil in China play havoc with the rest of the world? It has already happened. On the first trading day of 2016, China’s central bank sent shockwaves around the world by sharply lowering the value of the yuan. The decline in the currency itself, which came after the bursting of a stock market bubble, was not the biggest concern, The Wall Street Journal reported. Rather it was a sudden loss of confidence in China’s growth story that reverberated around the world.

The shine has come off India’s growth. Most countries would crave a growth rate as high as 5.7 per cent, but this is a setback for a country that recently boasted of growth rates higher than China’s. The slowdown exposes underlying fragilities that no triumphalist talk could conceal. What lessons the government takes from this, and how it responds, will determine the contours of the economy and its growth prospects for a long time, the Financial Times reported. The call for reforms has not gone unheeded by the government of Narendra Modi.

China Development Bank plans to sign a document signaling support for the restructuring plan of debt-laden Brazilian phone carrier Oi SA, said two people close to the discussions. The bank may sign the agreement with Oi as soon as Tuesday, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private negotiations, Bloomberg News reported. The Chinese bank has been discussing in court how to restructure $1.2 billion in financing it provided to Oi just six months before the operator filed for the largest judicial recovery in Latin America’s history.

Sagging economic growth in India is complicating efforts to clean up a mountain of bad debt at the nation’s banks, Bloomberg News reported. Loans worth 1.7 trillion rupees ($26 billion) have been withdrawn in total since the 2001 inception of the Corporate Debt Restructuring Mechanism through to the end of August, according to the latest data from the agency that brokers agreements between borrowers and lenders. That’s a net increase of 446 billion rupees from the end of 2016, and already exceeds the 415 billion rupees of loans that couldn’t be revamped last year, the data show.

Australia’s central bank has warned that household borrowing is a key risk to the country’s financial system as higher interest rates could see households struggle to repay their debt, the Financial Times reported. “Higher interest rates, or falls in income, could see some highly indebted households struggle to service their debt and so curtail their spending,” the RBA said in its latest Financial Stability Review. Low interest rates and weak wage growth have seen debt levels relative to income edge higher, the central bank said.

The debate in China over economic reform has just become more interesting. Central Bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan on Monday called for freer trade and an end to capital controls as essential to restructure the economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Coming on the eve of the Communist Party Congress, this could be an important moment. Mr. Zhou is right that a convertible currency—the yuan—is key to rebalancing China’s economy from its long-time dependence on high savings and investment.

Turkey’s markets took a hammering amid a deepening standoff between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government and the U.S. The lira, stocks and bonds tumbled, while the cost of insuring Turkish credit against a default rose after the two NATO members suspended visa services for each other’s citizens, Bloomberg News reported. The selloff underlined Turkey’s vulnerability as the prospect of U.S.