Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida unveiled on Monday the pillars of a new economic stimulus package to be compiled next month to help households ease the pain of price hikes and boost wages, Reuters reported. Kishida will instruct his cabinet on Tuesday to put together the package and swiftly set up an extra budget to fund it, he said. It will include measures to protect people from cost-push inflation, back sustainable wage and income growth, promote domestic investment to spur growth, reform to overcome dwindling populations, and encourage infrastructure investment.

Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda said there was "very high uncertainty" over whether companies would continue raising prices and wages, stressing anew the bank's resolve to maintain ultra-loose monetary policy, Reuters reported. He also offered a cautious take on the overseas economic outlook, warning of the fallout from aggressive U.S. interest rate hikes and sluggish growth in the Chinese economy. The key to the outlook for monetary policy is whether strong wage growth and consumption, rather than cost pressures from rising import costs, become the key driver of inflation, Ueda said.

Philippine central bank Governor Eli Remolona said he is open to an unscheduled interest-rate hike before the November meeting and that a pivot to easing was unlikely in the first half of 2024, Bloomberg News reported. “I am open to an off-cycle increase,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Manila on Monday, acknowledging that his rhetoric has become “more hawkish” since taking office in July.

Hackers stole around $200 million from crypto firm Mixin early on Saturday, the company said on social media platform X on Monday, in what researchers say is the largest crypto theft so far this year, Reuters reported. Mixin, which lists its location on LinkedIn as Hong Kong, said the database of its network's cloud service provider was "attacked by hackers, resulting in the loss of some assets" and that "the funds involved are approximately US$200 million". Mixin describes itself as a network for transferring digital assets. It has one million users, according to its website.

The steepening downturn in China’s real-estate markets has led China Evergrande to scrap a $35 billion debt-restructuring plan designed to ensure the property developer’s survival, a sign that China’s ongoing housing crisis could still get worse, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. China Evergrande, among the largest property developers in China, popped the country’s real-estate bubble in 2021 when it spiraled into insolvency and set off a chain of developer defaults.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese investors are confronting a distressing reality: Their investments with Zhongzhi Enterprise Group, a financial giant managing $140 billion in assets, and its trust banking arm, Zhongrong, might be at risk, the New York Times reported. Starting in July, companies affiliated with Zhongzhi missed dozens of payments to investors. They have offered no timetable for when people will be paid, fueling concerns that one of China’s largest so-called shadow banks may be near collapse.

China has limited room for further monetary policy easing, and it should pursue structural reforms such as encouraging entrepreneurs rather than counting on macroeconomic policies to revive growth, a central bank adviser said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Liu Shijin, a member of the People's Bank of China's (PBOC) monetary policy committee, told a financial forum in Shanghai that Beijing's room for monetary policy easing was limited by widening interest rate differentials with the U.S. Fiscally, Chinese governments at various levels are under stress, he told the annual Bund Summit conference.

BCC has filed for bankruptcy and the administrators of the electronics chain informed its employees on Thursday morning, NL Times reported. The court granted BCC a deferment of payment last week. The electronics chain has 58 stores, an online shop, and around 1,300 employees. If the court declares BCC bankrupt, the bankruptcy administrators can start working on a possible restart, potentially saving some of the jobs. The electronics chain has been struggling with financial problems.

Bank of Japan Gov. Kazuo Ueda, defying speculation about a near-term rise in interest rates, said Japan couldn’t yet be confident of sustainable inflation backed by strong wage growth, although prices are currently rising faster than the central bank’s 2% target, the Wall Street Journal reported. He said he planned to keep a benchmark short-term interest rate in negative territory for now—the same place it has been since 2016.

Indian budget carrier Akasa Air has been forced to cut flights in the short-term after many of its pilots quit abruptly, sparking a legal dispute in court where the company has warned that further resignations may even force it to shut down, Reuters reported. A small set of pilots "abandoned their duties" and left without serving their mandatory contractual notice period, causing a disruption of flights, but the airline is on course to invest in growing its operations and ordering more planes, CEO Vinay Dube told employees in an email on Tuesday.