Japan’s consumer inflation ground to a halt for the first time in more than two years and household spending unexpectedly fell in July, increasing pressure on policy makers to offer fresh fiscal and monetary support to underpin a fragile recovery. The gloomy data, coupled with soft exports that were blamed on China’s slowdown, reinforces the dominant market view that any rebound in Japan’s growth after the contraction from April to June will be modest.

Signs are emerging that Chinese property investments abroad will maintain their torrid pace despite the market turmoil, as wealthy individuals and well-heeled companies seek to shelter their money in more stable havens abroad. In Australia, where China earlier this year topped the U.S. as the biggest source of foreign real-estate investment, officials are worried that wealthy Chinese investors will pour more money into an already overheated Australian property market.

State owned enterprise minister Todd McClay says Landcorp won't turn a profit for "the next few years" and is again foreshadowing land sales, Stuff.co.nz reported. Record low dairy prices saw profits plunge by $25m, Landcorp said Thursday. It's got debts of around $250 million and is locked into an expensive dairy conversion project of 26,000 hectares at Wairakei, near Taupo. McClay says there will be no taxpayer-funded bailout for the state-owner farmer. And he rejects Labour's comparisons with troubled coal company Solid Energy, which is in voluntary administration.

Boom times for luxury in China are largely over, after the recent stock market rout and currency devaluation, compounded by an already slowing economy and a government crackdown on lavish gift-giving, the International New York Times reported. The effect of those woes on Chinese shoppers — who make up as much as a third of global spending on high-end goods — has rattled both investors and global luxury brands.

China’s central bank on Tuesday cut its benchmark interest rate and freed banks to lend more, the latest signs of the government’s growing distress over slumping stocks and slowing economic growth, the International New York Times reported. The central bank’s action followed a global stock market rout in which China led the declines. The main Shanghai share index plunged an additional 7.6 percent on Tuesday, to its lowest level this year.

The China-led turmoil that has rocked global markets in the past two weeks has also shaken the ruling Communist party and left Li Keqiang, the prime minister, fighting for his political future, according to analysts and people familiar with the internal workings of the party. Among party officials and politically connected people in Beijing, the hottest topic of conversation is whether Mr Li will take the fall for Beijing’s perceived mismanagement of the stock market crash and the country’s broader economic slowdown.

A Western Australian electrical contractor that has been operating for more than 30 years and supplied machinery for mining in the Pilbara region has collapsed into voluntary administration, SmartCompany.com.au reported. Cape Range Electrical Contractors is a Newman-based electrical contractor business specialising in the supply, installation and maintenance for individual and commercial clients. The family-owned business has been operating since 1973 and mainly services the Newman and Pilbara region.

Bad news from China has sparked a firestorm in the developing countries that feed its vast industrial machine, leaving a swath of economies with few good ways to escape a crunch, The Wall Street Journal reported. In Indonesia, coal once bound for China is piled up in port. In South Africa, mines that fed China’s voracious demand for metals are firing workers. In financial markets, investors have responded by pulling out. On Monday, the currencies of Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and other commodity exporters tumbled to multiyear lows against the U.S. dollar.

After spending about $200bn buying shares to prop up falling equity prices over the past seven weeks, Beijing capitulated to market forces on Monday by choosing not to intervene as the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index fell 8.5 per cent, the Financial Times reported. The fall was the worst since February 2007. But unlike on most other days since the government launched an unprecedented effort to reverse plunging equities last month, the “national team” of state-owned stock buyers did not jump in to support the market.

The People’s Bank of China is preparing to flood the banking system with liquidity to boost lending, according to officials and advisers to the central bank, as its recent currency moves are squeezing yuan funds out of the market and renewing concerns over capital leaving Chinese shores, The Wall Street Journal reported.