Asia Pacific

Fears of a hard landing in China are looking increasingly overdone, indicators in the past few days show, and investor fears of sudden slowdown in the world’s second largest economy are easing, the Irish Times reported. Data at this time of year are always skewed by the two-week holiday for Chinese new year, but the trend remained upbeat. February inflation dropped more than expected to give a 3.2 per cent year-on-year rise, its slowest pace in 20 months, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and compared to 4.5 per cent the previous month.

China intends to extend renminbi loans to other Brics nations, in another step towards the internationalisation of its currency, the Financial Times reported. The China Development Bank will sign a memorandum of understanding in New Delhi with its Brazilian, Russian, Indian and South African counterparts on March 29, say people familiar with their talks. Under the agreement CDB, which lends mainly in dollars overseas, will make renminbi loans available, while the other Brics nations’ development banks will also extend loans denominated in their respective currencies.

A major creditor of Proview Electronics, which is challenging Apple Inc.'s use of the iPad trademark, has moved to have the ailing computer monitor maker liquidated, reports said Monday, the Associated Press reported. Taiwan-based Fubon Insurance is seeking $8.68 million in debts and has filed an application to have Proview declared bankrupt, the reports by the Xinhua News Agency and other mainland media said.

The Chinese economy, after nearly three decades of rapid, almost uninterrupted growth, seems to be settling down to a still strong but less blistering pace. But some sectors are struggling, including exports and luxury residential real estate construction, the International Herald Tribune reported. Premier Wen said in his annual report to the National People’s Congress on Monday morning in Beijing that the government had scaled its economic growth target back to 7.5 percent this year, down from the 8 percent that Beijing has set as a minimum growth target in recent years.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda faces an increasingly uphill battle to push through a plan to double the nation's sales tax, struggling to win support from both opposition parties and his own government amid rising global scrutiny of Tokyo's deteriorating fiscal condition, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Noda needs to meet an end of March deadline, as stipulated by the tax law, to submit to parliament a bill that would raise the 5% consumption tax to 10% by 2015.

South Korea has begun collecting a levy on domestic banks and local branches of foreign banks it introduced in August, hoping to help the economy guard against shocks stemming from rapid capital flows in and out of the country, the Finance Ministry said Sunday. The Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. paid $759,000, making it the first foreign or domestic bank to pay what is called the "macroprudential stability levy" to the Bank of Korea.

Directors of some pension funds that invested money with AIJ Investment Advisors Co. say they were attracted by promises of high, or at least sustainable, returns on their investments through the global economic downturn, The Wall Street Journal reported. Now those funds may be facing losses, days after Japan's Financial Services Agency ordered AIJ to suspend its operations, saying the firm allegedly lost most of ¥183 billion ($2.27 billion) in funds it managed. Neither AIJ nor its broker, ITM Securities Co., has been accused of wrongdoing.

Elpida Memory filed for protection from creditors on Monday with $5.6 billion in debt, the biggest bankruptcy filing by a Japanese manufacturer, after potential partners failed to come through to rescue the cash-strapped chipmaker, Reuters reported. Japan, which had lent or invested 40 billion yen ($500 million) with the country's last maker of PC memory chips to help it through the post-Lehman Brothers crisis, appeared to throw in the towel this time as it confronts slumping prices and relentless competition from well-funded Korean rivals.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick said that China's economic growth model is "unsustainable" and urged deep reforms to avoid a sharp downturn on growth over the coming two decades, The Wall Street Journal reported. There are "stress points [in the economy] that will expand over time rather than [turn into] a crisis," he said at a conference in Beijing where the World Bank and the Development Research Center, an influential government think tank, jointly introduced a report, "China 2030," that recommended sharp reforms in China's economy.

Japan's financial regulator said Friday it has halted operations of a little-known Tokyo money-management company after the firm allegedly lost billions of dollars in client money, The Wall Street Journal reported. In one of the biggest cases of its kind in Japan, with Tokyo's reputation as a financial center still bruised by the billion-dollar Olympus Corp. accounting scandal, the regulator said investigators found that AIJ Investment Advisors Co. can't account for "most of" the 183 billion yen, or about $2.3 billion, in pension-fund assets under management.