Half a year after China lifted Covid-19 restrictions and reopened its borders, few international travelers are coming—another sign of decoupling between China and the West that could have negative repercussions for a long time, the Wall Street Journal reported. Foreign travelers’ absence is particularly evident in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where the numbers of foreigners who visited in the first half of the year totaled less than a quarter of comparable figures in 2019, before the Covid pandemic.

China's central bank governor pledged on Thursday to guide more financial resources towards the private economy, suggesting refreshed urgency from Beijing to bolster the confidence among private firms as economic momentum weakens, Reuters reported. During a meeting on Thursday with at least eight private firms from sectors including property, aluminium and agribusiness, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Pan Gongsheng said the bank would roll out guidelines to support private firms.

The wage law enforcement agency of the Australian state of Victoria on Wednesday said it has filed more than 1,000 charges against top grocer Woolworths Group (WOW.AX), alleging failure to pay A$1 million ($659,000) in long-service leave to over 1,200 former employees, Reuters reported. The Wage Inspectorate Victoria (WIV) said that between 2018 and 2021, Woolworths did not pay more than A$960,000 in long-service leave entitlements to 1,199 former employees.

The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) Mumbai recently had allowed an application filed by Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction Company Limited and initiated Corporate insolvency proceedings against well known art director Nitin Desai’s ND’s Art World Pvt Ltd over a debt of Rs 252 crore, the Economic Times of India reported. Edelweiss had filed the company petition last year to initiate Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process against the Corporate Debtor for unresolved financial debt of Rs 252 crore.

China will lower financing costs for firms, stabilise market expectations and support the property sector in coming months, the central bank said on Tuesday amid a flagging economic recovery, Reuters reported. The world's No.2 economy staged a better-than-expected recovery in the first quarter following COVID reopening but has lost steam since the April-June quarter as demand waned both at home and abroad.

Some Chinese city governments have made it harder for developers to access tens of billions of dollars from property sales held in escrow accounts, raising risks the cash-strapped companies will be squeezed even more, Reuters reported. The moves are aimed at ensuring the completion of more unfinished projects at the city level, they said, at a time home sales are sliding and the future of the whole sector is uncertain.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, was supposed to leave China behind when the country made cryptocurrency trading illegal in 2021. Almost two years later, users traded $90 billion of cryptocurrency-related assets in China in a single month, according to internal figures viewed by The Wall Street Journal and current and former employees. The transactions made China Binance’s biggest market by far, accounting for 20% of volume worldwide, excluding trades made by a subset of very large traders.

One of China’s last major developers to have so far avoided defaults amid the nation’s property debt crisis slid in equity and credit markets Tuesday, after canceling a share placement, Bloomberg News reported. Shares of Country Garden Holdings Co., one of China’s largest private-sector developers, fell as much as 11% in their biggest drop this year, and ended down 7.6%. Its closely watched dollar bond due January next year, its nearest such maturity, dropped 2.3 cents Tuesday to 32.5 cents, a level that indicates high uncertainty on repayment.

Chinese ministries, regulators and the central bank on Tuesday pledged more financing support to small businesses, suggesting an urgency among policymakers to revive the private sector amid a flagging economic recovery, Reuters reported. China will encourage financial institutions to offer targeted and diversified financial support to some small and medium-sized enterprises in the manufacturing sector, according to a joint statement by the industry and finance ministries, financial and securities regulators and the central bank.

China's currency regulators are asking some commercial banks to reduce or postpone their purchases of U.S. dollars in order to slow the yuan's depreciation, Reuters reported. The informal instruction, or the so-called window guidance, is the latest in a series of steps taken by authorities this year to bolster a currency that has been hit by China's faltering post-pandemic economic recovery and rising yields for the U.S. dollar and other major currencies.