The Bank of Japan still has policy options to continue its unprecedented monetary easing, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in an interview days after the central bank announced it wouldn’t expand its main stimulus target, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. "I think they still have policies they can pursue," Suga said yesterday when asked about concerns the program could be reaching its limits.

China Great Wall Asset Management Corp. said today that two state entities will become investors and that it will seek more investors to pave the way for an eventual initial public offering, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The asset-management company--one of four Chinese financial institutions known as “bad banks” for buying up sour loans--said that China’s National Social Security Fund and China Life Insurance will buy unspecified stakes in the firm. It didn’t disclose details.

Georgia’s prime minister announced his resignation yesterday without explaining his reasons, the Associated Press reported yesterday. Irakli Garibashvili is an ally of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose Georgian Dream party routed supporters of former President Mikheil Saakashvili in a 2012 election. He has served as prime minister of the former Soviet nation since November 2013. Georgian media had speculated that Garibashvili would step down to focus all his energy on the campaign for Georgian Dream in parliamentary elections next November.

Loan growth at Indian banks slowed in the six months through September while bad loans rose, signaling increased risks to lenders, the Reserve Bank of India said in a report, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. "Risks to the banking sector increased due to deteriorating asset quality, lower soundness and sluggish profitability,” the RBI, which is also the industry’s regulator, said in a report yesterday. Credit growth slowed to 9.4 percent in the period from 9.7 percent at the end of March, the central bank said.

China’s central bank said that it would extend the yuan’s trading hours in the mainland market starting next month, in a much-anticipated move aimed at increasing the Chinese currency’s global appeal, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The People’s Bank of China said that beginning on Jan. 4, the hours for buying and selling the yuan on the mainland will be extended to 11:30 p.m. local time, from the current 4:30 p.m.

National Bank of Greece said yesterday that it had agreed to sell a majority stake in Finansbank of Turkey to Qatar National Bank for 2.75 billion euros, or about $3 billion, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. The Greek bank began exploring “strategic options” for its Turkish business last year after the European Central Bank identified a capital shortfall at National Bank of Greece and at other Greek lenders.

Indian lawmakers sent a proposed bankruptcy law for review today, closing off a raucous parliament session without transacting any major legislative business including a signature reform on state taxes, Reuters reported. The bankruptcy law is aimed at unifying and overhauling rules governing the liquidation or revival of ailing companies into a single code and for the first time imposing deadlines. Its passage was widely considered to be a done deal after the government introduced the legislation as a money bill which could not have been blocked in the opposition-dominated upper house.

Turkey’s central bank left interest rates unchanged for a 10th consecutive month on Tuesday, sending markets tumbling after it defied expectations that it would raise rates in tandem with the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Monetary Policy Committee kept the benchmark one-week repo rate at 7.5 percent, and left unchanged its interest-rate corridor, ranging from the overnight borrowing rate of 7.25 percent to the 10.75 percent overnight lending rate.

The Indian government yesterday introduced a bill in parliament aimed at bringing sweeping changes to an outdated and overburdened bankruptcy system, setting deadlines for the first time for processing insolvency cases, Reuters reported. At present, Asia's third-largest economy has competing laws with unclear jurisdictions to deal with the liquidation or revival of companies. The bill, introduced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in the lower house, seeks to enact a single bankruptcy code.

Shades of the 1990s are haunting China’s rust-belt cities as strapped state-owned employers look at cutting jobs, with beleaguered Wuhan Iron & Steel Group the latest company said to be laying off thousands of workers, the Financial Times reported. The dismantling of market pricing reforms and the “iron rice bowl” system of life-long jobs in the 1990s eliminated thousands of state-owned small or medium-sized enterprises, which specialised in everything from industrial boilers to wedding photographs.