Asia Pacific

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said that the country's central bank is right to consider new tools to curb housing demand, including limits on low-deposit mortgages, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. “Absent of any other alternative, then rapidly increasing house prices may see the Reserve Bank raising interest rates,” Key said. Limiting lending on deposits of as little as 5 percent of the purchase price will hurt first-home buyers, who are struggling to save bigger downpayments as New Zealand house-price inflation accelerates.

China eliminated the lower limit on lending rates offered by the nation’s financial institutions as growth slows and authorities expand the role of markets in the world’s second-biggest economy, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday. The change, effective on Saturday, removes a floor set at 30 percent below the current 6 percent benchmark, according to a People’s Bank of China statement yesterday. While the move temporarily jolted world stocks higher, the PBOC acknowledged that it was a limited step and said that freeing up deposit rates would be more important.

Australia's takeover regulator declined a request from Oaktree Capital Management and Centerbridge Partners to delay a $359 million refinancing deal surfwear for company Billabong International Ltd on anti-trust concerns, Reuters reported yesterday. The two U.S. hedge funds, whose own refinancing proposals were rebuffed by Billabong, had asked the Takeovers Panel to intervene in the deal with Altamont Capital Partners because some elements, including a hefty break fee, were "anti-competitive and coercive". The panel declined to stop the sale but would still investigate the deal.

Japan's remarkable economic rebound is likely to give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a landslide victory in Sunday's elections, but that growth is expected to fizzle within a year or two, unless Abe uses his momentum from that win to accelerate policy changes, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Economists are already projecting a big drop in growth as early as next year, citing everything from Japan's stubbornly depressed wages and slow business investment to a plunge in the amount of government spending that is expected to flow through the economy.

China's push to get consumers to open their wallets more and refocus the economy on domestic consumption is stalling, contributing to lower growth in the second quarter and forecasts of even slower momentum ahead, The Wall Street Journal reported. A slew of data released on Monday showed that disposable income growth for urban households slowed to 6.5% in the first half compared with a year ago, down from 9.7% growth in the first half of 2012 and below the growth rate of the economy as a whole.

China’s credit crunch in June spurred hundreds of millions of households and companies to divert a record share of their savings into wealth-management products, known as WMPs. The amount of such investments surged eightfold from 2009 to 8.2 trillion yuan as of the end of March, according to government data. That’s almost the size of the Australian economy. Fitch Ratings put the amount even higher in May, at 13 trillion yuan, Bloomberg reported.

Finance ministers from the Group of 20 leading nations plan to launch a new phase of the international crackdown on corporate tax avoidance this week even as UK business leaders are warning their government to resist “radical new solutions” to profit shifting by multinationals, the Financial Times reported. Britain has taken a lead in pressing for reform of the international tax rules after a wave of public anger over the low tax bills paid by some large multinationals.

China's reform-minded leaders are more willing than ever to raise the pain threshold for the economy to push through long-term reforms, despite a protracted slowdown that has sparked calls for looser monetary policy, Reuters reported in an analysis. Grim trade data for June last week fanned market talk of fresh steps to support an economy heading for its weakest growth this year in more than two decades.

Instead of fixing Cyprus’s problems, a tough rescue package for the Mediterranean nation has helped turn what began as a banking fiasco into a deep slump across an economy that, according to forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, will shrink by 9 percent this year and 4 percent next year, the International Herald Tribune reported. That is bad enough, but, given the I.M.F.’s record of underestimating the pain to be suffered by earlier bailout recipients like Greece, the bleak forecast could prove too optimistic.

Australia's largest organic poultry farm, Inglewood Farms, has gone into receivership owing $60 million, The Chronicle reported. The announcement was made following news the company's directors wanted to resign after shareholders indicated that they would not provide additional funding to support ongoing operations. The company, which is a subsidiary of RM Williams, employs about 100 people and operates on a 1710 hectare property near Inglewood.