Despite Japan’s reputation for economic sluggishness, Tokyo is flooded with help-wanted signs. The unemployment rate has fallen to 3%, and on Tuesday the government said the number of unemployed people fell below two million for the first time since 1995. It also said there are 140 jobs for every 100 people looking for work, the highest level in a quarter-century, The Wall Street Journal reported. If the economy expands in the current quarter, as economists expect, it would be the longest growth stretch in six years. The growth is still sluggish, less than 1% expected this year.

Hangzhou’s local government is piloting a “social credit” system the Communist Party has said it wants to roll out nationwide by 2020, a digital reboot of the methods of social control the regime uses to avert threats to its legitimacy, The Wall Street Journal reported. More than three dozen local governments across China are beginning to compile digital records of social and financial behavior to rate creditworthiness. A person can incur black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules.

Two of Australia’s biggest banks have agreed to pay a combined fine of 15 million Australian dollars (€10.5 million) after admitting to attempted cartel conduct aimed at rigging the benchmark rate for the Malaysian ringgit, the Irish Times reported. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Australia’s competition watchdog, said on Friday that ANZ Bank had admitted to 10 instances of attempted cartel conduct, while Macquarie had admitted to eight instances in 2011.

A new strain of trickle-down economics has been spawned by the decision, on November 8th, to withdraw the bulk of India’s banknotes by the end of this year, The Economist reported. As holders of now-useless 500-and 1,000-rupee ($15) notes rushed to deposit them or part-exchange them for new notes, an e-commerce site offered helpers, at 90 rupees an hour, to queue outside banks in order to save the well-off the bother. Elsewhere, a chronic shortage of banknotes in a cash-dominated economy has left most trades depressed.

Taiwan's TransAsia Airways Corp said on Tuesday it would wind down operations and suspend all scheduled flights, failing to recover from two plane crashes in almost three years, Reuters reported. In addition to struggling to overcome safety concerns raised by Taiwan's regulator, the island's third-largest carrier has been hit by intense competition, reporting losses for the previous six quarters. It shut down its low-cost offering, V Air, last month.

Effective implementation of Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code can potentially release about Rs 25,000 crore of capital over the next 4-5 years currently locked in bad loans, according to a report. "If implemented successfully, the code will help India's banking sector catch up with or even exceed the recovery rates of 32 per cent and average time taken of 2.8 years in other emerging markets," said an Assocham-Crisil joint study. It said the capital released can be deployed for other productive lending which could help in credit expansion.

South Korea's Hanjin Shipping Co Ltd said on Tuesday it decided to sell part of its container ship business to Korea Line Corp for 37 billion Korean won ($31.38 million). Korea Line will buy Hanjin's Pacific routes shipping business, relevant client management information, units in seven countries including the United States, China and Vietnam, as well as assets and manpower related to logistics systems, Hanjin said in a regulatory filing. Hanjin said the sale, which will be completed on Jan. 5, 2017, is to secure funds to pay off creditors.

Officials in one of China’s hottest property markets have banned developers from borrowing money to buy land, as local governments embrace increasingly drastic measures to curb soaring home prices, the Financial Times reported. Prices of new residential properties in Nanjing were up 40 per cent year on year in September, in line with increases in other big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Over recent months, local governments have tried to cool residential property prices by making it more difficult for people to buy homes.

In its never-ending quest to rein in profligate local officials, China this week ordered its indebted cities and provinces to draw up detailed repayment plans. But for these rules to work, the central government must prove that it is willing to let the miscreants default. Creditors doubt its resolve and expect it to go on bailing out the spendthrifts. As a result, they systematically give more generous lending terms to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than to their private peers, The Economist reported. The bias is not immediately obvious.

The Chinese company that’s said to be in exclusive discussions to acquire English Premier League soccer team Southampton for as much as 200 million pounds ($248.8 million) has requested a halt to trading in its shares for a further month pending the conclusion of efforts to acquire sports assets, Bloomberg News reported. Shares in Lander Sports Development Co. have not traded since October, and the company requires the suspension to remain pending “major asset restructuring,” it said Wednesday in a regulatory filing.