Australia’s government will introduce legislation this week to facilitate the largest overhaul of the central bank in a generation, including setting up a separate governance board and scrapping the treasurer’s power to reverse policy decisions, Bloomberg News reported. The bill is the result of an independent review of the Reserve Bank that made 51 recommendations, some of which require modifications to the RBA’s operating law.

Australia's competition watchdog said on Monday new competition laws were required in response to the rapid expansion of digital platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft in the country, Reuters reported. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in its latest report for the Digital Platform Services Inquiry raised concerns that expansion of these platforms has increased the risk of them engaging in harmful behaviour such as invasive data collection and practices that lock in customers and limit their choices.

China, Japan and South Korea agreed on Sunday to restart cooperation and pave the way for a summit in the latest move to ease tensions between the Asian neighbours, Reuters reported. Even as China and the United States seek to mend frayed ties, including a summit this month between Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, Beijing is concerned that Washington and its key regional allies are strengthening their three-way partnership.

India's Jindal Power Ltd, the only company whose expression of interest to take over Go First was accepted by creditors, has decided to not follow through with a bid, three people familiar with the plans said, pushing the insolvent airline closer to liquidation. The deadline to submit takeover bids ends on Tuesday, and the sources told Reuters Jindal had decided against bidding after evaluating the airline's financial statements. While the deadline can be extended via an application to the courts, creditors are currently not inclined to do so, two banking sources said.

China left benchmark lending rates unchanged at a monthly fixing on Monday, matching expectations, as a weaker yuan continued to limit further monetary easing and policymakers waited to see the effects of previous stimulus on credit demand, Reuters reported. Recent data shows the recovery in the world's second-largest economy remains patchy with industrial output and retail sales surprising on the upside but deflation gathering pace and few signs the struggling property market will bounce back any time soon.

An apex court ruling in India allowing bankruptcy proceedings against personal guarantors of defaulting borrowers is set to raise the recovery rate for public-sector lenders to at least 19% from about 14% now, industry estimates showed, The Economist reported. "The recent ruling has potential to improve the recovery in existing written-off accounts, many of which are through the bankruptcy code, and result in 5 percentage point incremental recovery from personal guarantees," said Hari Hara Mishra, CEO, ARC Association.

In Shenzhen, a metropolis born of China’s economic prosperity, Paibang Village is a reminder of the city’s modest past and the challenges ahead for reviving the country’s property sector. Paibang is what China calls an urban village, a labyrinth of low-slung apartment buildings and mom-and-pop storefronts connected by a maze of alleyways and narrow roads. There are hundreds of them in Shenzhen, a municipality of 18 million people next to Hong Kong, and thousands of such villages across China.

Office workers are not the only ones grumbling about the unattractiveness of Qianhai, a special economic zone where Chinese dreams of global financial might and economic prosperity that once seemed inevitable are now darkened by half-empty skyscrapers and shopping malls as well as barely used motorways, Reuters reported. This Shenzhen appendix opened for business more than a decade ago after an initial investment of $45 billion, with state media calling it mainland China's own Hong Kong: a future international tech and finance hub; a testbed for liberalising markets and information access.

Pakistan and the International Monetary Fund reached a much-awaited preliminary agreement Wednesday for the release of $700 million from a $3 billion bailout fund approved by the international lender in July, the Associated Press reported. The standby credit fund is meant to save cash-strapped Pakistan from default. The two sides reached the staff-level agreement during talks in Islamabad, a statement from the IMF said. Pakistan's government also confirmed the deal and and hailed it.

Singapore awarded a batch of in-principle license approvals to stablecoin issuers, intensifying the competition among Asian financial hubs for a slice of a key crypto segment with a market value of $127 billion, Bloomberg News reported. The approvals for Paxos Digital Singapore Pte and StraitsX open up a pathway for issuing such tokens under regulatory oversight. Stablecoins are typically pegged 1-1 to major currencies and backed by reserves like cash and bonds.