Chinese commodities trader COFCO has asked to participate in an auction in Brazil where a sugar mill owned by India's Shree Renuka Sugars Ltd will be sold as part of an in-court debt restructuring, according to court documents seen by Reuters on Tuesday. COFCO already owns four sugar and ethanol plants in Brazil capable of processing a combined 15 million tonnes of cane per year. The company looked at other potential targets last year, but said prices were too high, Reuters reported.

Chinese companies battling to cope with the government-induced tightening in funding markets are bracing themselves for the next shoe to fall: a wave of early bond redemptions. The nation’s businesses sold about 65 percent of all corporate bonds with put options worldwide, at 3.9 trillion yuan ($580 billion), Bloomberg News reported. Creditors holding some 2 trillion yuan of mainland notes will be able to exercise those options in the next two years, forcing issuers to either increase interest payments or redeem the debt early.

In China, taxi rides aren’t just a form of transportation any more. They’ve also become useful for bond buyers doing due diligence. Dining out at restaurants is also helpful. It’s all part of a boom in field trips by market participants coming to grips with a new reality in China: the potential for bond defaults. After decades when authorities effectively provided blanket assistance to keep troubled companies from going under, the Communist leadership’s focus on shuttering unproductive assets has upended the market, Bloomberg News reported.

Noble Group Ltd.’s crisis escalated as Moody’s Investors Service Inc. flagged an elevated risk of default after the embattled Hong Kong-based commodity trader warned of a quarterly loss of as much as $1.8 billion and announced more asset sales, Bloomberg News reported. “The further expected deterioration in Noble’s financial results in the second quarter of 2017 suggests that default risk will remain elevated,” Gloria Tsuen, a Moody’s vice president and senior analyst, said in a statement as the company’s shares tanked in Singapore.

A number of creditors and others involved in Toshiba Corp.’s restructuring are pushing for a Toshiba bankruptcy filing as the best path to rebirth after its effort to raise money through a chip-unit sale stalled, The Wall Street Journal reported. People involved in talks over Toshiba’s workout, including business partners, lawyers and people with ties to the company’s main bankers, said bankruptcy is worth serious study. Some of them said it is the best available option and that they are advocating it in discussions with Toshiba or creditors.

Doomsayers have plenty to work with in China. The country’s rapid buildup of debt -- reaching approximately 260 percent of GDP, from 160 percent less than a decade ago -- seems almost guaranteed to herald a financial crash or at least a major correction, quite likely followed by years of stagnation, a Bloomberg View reported. If the world’s second-biggest economy ultimately defies the doubters, though, this may well be seen as the year things turned around. Consider this: China is on track to see its best nominal GDP performance since 2011, even as credit growth remains moderate.

Noble Group Ltd. abandoned its global commodity-trading ambitions and set out a plan to fall back on its Asian roots as a second-quarter loss of as much as $1.8 billion challenges its survival, Bloomberg News reported. The trading house’s bonds slumped after it warned of a quarterly loss triple its market value and said it would sell almost all of its businesses outside Asia. The announcement all but ends hopes Noble could survive as a major force in global commodities trading by attracting a “white knight” investor to inject fresh capital.

Singapore is ranked the second most competitive economy globally by the World Economic Forum, and is actually faster than most other countries in resolving insolvencies involving assets of all kinds, according to the World Bank, Bloomberg News reported. But when it comes to the city’s bond market in particular, resolutions have been slower than in some other major markets, according to restructuring advisers. The speed of such cases is a key focus for investors after the nation suffered an unprecedented S$1.35 billion ($992 million) of local note defaults since November 2015.

India is making good progress in dealing with bad loans that are weighing down on the country’s banks, suggesting long-term valuations for the financial industry are set to improve, according to the head of HDFC Bank Ltd, Bloomberg News reported. The resolution of soured debt will help boost valuations, Aditya Puri, HDFC Bank’s managing director, said in an interview at his office in Mumbai.

In the central Indian village of Raikheda, the construction of a thermal coal power plant once promised jobs and economic progress. Years after its completion though, the debt-saddled project that promised power supply to hundreds of thousands of homes, sits mostly idle, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. It is unable to buy coal to power the plant or sell electricity to utilities. Dozens of nearby stores that were reliant on the project's success have shut down. Raikheda is not alone.