A tightening of leverage, coupled with soaring land costs, looks set to end the home price windfall that China's developers have enjoyed this year.Prices of new dwellings, excluding government-subsidized housing, gained in March in 62 of the 70 cities tracked by the government, compared with 56 in February, the National Bureau of Statistics said last month. On Monday, Longfor Properties Co.

India's move to strengthen the hand of its central bank will help it push reluctant lenders towards writedowns and errant borrowers into insolvency, bankers said, but the country is far from drawing a line under its $150 billion (£116 billion) of sour debts, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. India's bad loan problem is choking off new credit and dampening economic growth, and the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows it needs to act.

A Chinese regulator announced on Friday that it had taken disciplinary measures against the Anbang Insurance Group, a financial behemoth that has tried to invest tens of billions of dollars overseas, for the improper sale of two investment products, the International New York Times reported. The moves by the China Insurance Regulatory Commission come against a backdrop of broader worries about the country’s financial system, in addition to ones about the insurance industry.

The World Bank has warned that Chinese local governments remain addicted to off-budget borrowing, despite Beijing’s efforts to impose fiscal discipline on localities and curb ballooning debt, the Financial Times reported. Runaway growth of local government debt is widely seen as a huge risk for China’s economy and financial system. Provinces, cities and counties borrowed heavily to spend on infrastructure to keep economic growth humming after the 2008 financial crisis.

State Bank of India, the country’s largest, sees a "positive turnaround" in the nation’s bad loan mess after the government implements a new rule aimed at resolving the problem, chairman of the lender said. "The non-performing asset cycle is different this time," Arundhati Bhattacharya, State Bank’s top executive, said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Yokohama, Japan. "Many assets are good quality and required by the economy -- when growth turns up, they will perform again,” Bloomberg News reported.

When a policy is applied for more than four years, and consistently fails to produce the intended result, it is tempting to declare it a failure. Critics of Japan’s economic stimulus declare exactly that. They are wrong. So-called Abenomics has not failed, and it should be sustained, not abandoned, the Financial Times reported. Critics of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic policy, which aims to combine monetary and fiscal stimulus with structural economic reforms, make a simple case. Abenomics began in the spring of 2013.

Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world’s largest lender by assets, reported its strongest quarterly profit growth in two years as soured credit and lending margins stabilized amid an uptick in the economy, Bloomberg News reported. Net income rose 1.4 percent to 75.79 billion yuan ($11 billion) in the three months ended March 31 from 74.76 billion yuan a year earlier, the Beijing-based lender said in an exchange filing on Friday. Rival lender Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. separately reported a 1.9 percent profit increase for the period.

India will overtake Germany in 2022 as the world's fourth-largest economy and push Britain out of the top five, based on analysis of growth projections by the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg News reported. But the challenges the South Asian nation must surmount to get there are many.

DBS Group Holdings Ltd. cut senior executive pay by 13 percent last year to hold managers accountable for weaknesses in three areas including surging nonperforming loans, Chief Executive Officer Piyush Gupta said. Besides bad loans, the management of Singapore’s largest bank penalized executives for a weaker performance in Greater China and “control lapses” on the regulatory front, Gupta told shareholders Thursday at the lender’s annual meeting, Bloomberg News reported.

Trading in Takata Corp shares was suspended on Thursday after a report that the Japanese airbag maker at the heart of the car industry's biggest-ever recall is considering a bankruptcy plan that will create a new company and ringfence its liabilities, Reuters reported. The Nikkei business daily reported Chinese-owned car parts maker Key Safety Systems (KSS), the company's preferred bidder, would sponsor the turnaround plan by injecting 200 billion yen ($1.8 billion) and helping create a new operating company.