Higher mortgage rates for millions of homeowners are shaking consumer confidence and raising the likelihood that Australia’s central bank will cut rates before the end of the year to help stave off a recession, The Wall Street Journal reported. The consumer squeeze stems from moves by commercial banks this month to raise lending rates to recover the cost of a new regulatory requirement to set aside more capital.

The fate of emerging market currencies is looming ever larger in the outlook for interest rates in the advanced world, promising that their central banks will keep policies super loose for some time to come, Reuters reported. Ever since China sprang a surprise depreciation of the yuan in August, the resulting decline of a whole host of emerging market (EM) currencies has produced a disinflationary pulse that the world is ill prepared to withstand.

China’s moves to ease mortgage restrictions and cut interest rates are bearing fruit in the nation’s smaller cities, where home prices have staged a recovery. Now comes the bigger challenge: Clearing a supply glut to spur investment by developers, Bloomberg News reported. Lower borrowing costs are helping a residential market recovery spread from the economic hubs such as Shanghai and Shenzhen to smaller and less-prosperous cities. New-home prices rose in September from August in more than half of the 70 major cities monitored by the government for the first time in 17 months.

In most respects, double-digit growth is a relic of the past for China. In the third quarter the economy grew by just 6.9% year-on-year according to official data, and probably by a percentage point or two less in reality. Yet bank loans increased by 15.4% in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2014, The Economist reported. Having released a torrent of credit to buoy the economy during the financial crisis, China was supposed to have started deleveraging by now.

China's Sinosteel will delay the payment of interest to its bondholders due on Tuesday, it said, after the state-owned company extended the date investors can start redeeming its bonds by a month. The company made the announcement in a statement posted on the website of one of the country's main bond clearing houses. On Monday, the steel trader extended a put option date for investors by a month, amid reports the debt-laden firm had asked investors to hold off seeking redemptions due to liquidity problems.

China’s bungled stock market bailout was a significant setback to its decades-long efforts to build a modern financial system, the International New York Times reported. Its currency devaluation shocked global investors and altered the policy calculus at central banks from Hanoi to Washington. A highly anticipated package of overhauls to sprawling state-owned companies was a crushing rebuke to hopes that China would move to privatize such businesses. Instead of reducing their stakes, the Communist Party said it would increase its control over such companies.

Singapore’s bond market is bracing for the latest unfortunate export from Indonesia: debt defaults, Bloomberg News reported. The city state, shrouded in smog from fires in its neighbor, is also starting to feel the impact of that nation’s currency woes. Indonesian phone retailer PT Trikomsel Oke’s Singapore-dollar bonds plunged to record lows last week after it blamed a weak rupiah when flagging a possible bond restructuring that would be the local market’s first in six years.

Lacking only façade work, wiring and paint, the red-brick duplexes lining a remote street in the Chinese port city of Qingdao could, if required, hit the market in a matter of days. That presents a problem for China and the world. Marketed as villas, the duplexes in the sprawling Shimao Noble Town aren’t quite complete and don’t have permits for sale. That makes them invisible to both national and local statisticians trying to get a handle on the size of China’s massive glut of empty and unfinished homes.

China Huarong Asset Management, the largest manager of distressed debt in China, is looking to raise up to $2.5 billion in an initial public offering in Hong Kong this month, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The bank is offering 5.77 billion shares at 3.03 to 3.39 Hong Kong dollars, or 39 cents to 44 cents, a share, according to people with direct knowledge of the offering terms. That means it could raise $2.3 billion to $2.5 billion. It has secured commitments worth $1.6 billion from 10 “cornerstone” investors, or large institutional buyers.

State owned miner Solid Energy faces a court action to cancel its scheme to repay creditors, Stuff.co.nz reported. Cargill International has filed in the High Court for termination of Solid's Energy's scheme to pay back trading creditors, banks and bondholders. Solid Energy was in partnership with Cargill at the Spring Creek mine on the West Coast from 2007 to 2012, when a crash in world coal prices started Solid Energy's slide into voluntary administration. Cargill said it lost US$42.4 million ($63.5m) in the mine and undelivered volumes of coal from the Spring Creek Mining Company.