Growing pessimism about China’s housing market is dragging down the country’s largest surviving developer, which is again struggling to convince investors that it can weather the storm, the Wall Street Journal reported. At the start of this year, investors had regained confidence in Country Garden 2007 4.97%increase; green up pointing triangle, a 31-year-old property giant that benefited from a slew of measures that Chinese authorities rolled out in November to support the real-estate sector.

China’s top housing official urged financial regulators and lenders to strengthen efforts to revive the country’s ailing property sector, Bloomberg News reported. In a recent meeting with property developers and builders, Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Ni Hong called for homebuyers who had paid off previous mortgages to be considered as first-time purchasers, the official Xinhua news agency reported Thursday. Up to now, many buyers in big cities who have a mortgage history but don’t currently own a property are subject to higher down-payment rules.

China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group said on Thursday that it had applied to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to resume trading in the company's shares on Friday, Reuters reported. Trading in the shares of the company, the electric vehicle unit of China Evergrande Group, has been suspended since April 1, 2022, after it got sucked into a debt crisis in mid-2021. Read more.

China’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to a record in the second quarter, although consumers and businesses are borrowing at a slow pace, reflecting low confidence that’s hitting economic growth, Bloomberg News reported. Total debt — combining the household, corporate and government sectors — climbed to 281.5% of gross domestic product in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg’s calculations based on data from China’s central bank and the National Bureau of Statistics. That was up from 279.7% in the first quarter.

China’s central bank called on the financial sector to help fund technology research and M&A deals, the latest in a string of promises to revive a private sector devastated by a two-year regulatory crackdown. A plethora of Beijing officials have in recent weeks talked about measures to prop up private firms, regarded as key to resuscitating a sputtering economy. On Thursday, the central bank asked lenders and financial markets to provide more support for innovation and tech-related acquisitions, and to boost investment in startups.

Turkey’s new central bank governor delivered a sobering assessment on inflation but pledged to stick with a “gradual” cycle of monetary tightening despite more than doubling the forecast for price gains, Bloomberg News reported. At an event on Thursday that marked her public debut, Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan had the task of restoring the credibility of an institution in need of rehabilitation in the eyes of the markets after years of unconventional measures championed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erkan, appointed last month after long stints in the US at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The dovish Bank of Japan faced a tough two-day policy-setting meeting that started Thursday due to potentially changing inflation dynamics, with edgy financial markets seesawing over whether its controversial yield cap program will be modified. The BOJ is widely expected to revise upward its earlier inflation forecast for the current fiscal year to next March, given more evidence that price hikes, initially prompted by surging fuel and raw material costs, have been broadening in a notable change for the once deflation-mired nation, the Japan Times reported.

Australia’s two biggest states will struggle to return their budgets to surplus as the economy sags under central bank rate hikes that also sent government borrowing costs soaring, according to ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service, Bloomberg News reported.

National Company Law Tribunal has appointed EY-backed Shailendra Ajmera as resolution professional (RP) of Coffee Day Global, according to an order uploaded on its website, the Economic Times of India reported. The bankruptcy court has admitted Coffee Day Global company for insolvency proceedings on the behest of IndusInd Bank, which filed a claim in court that the company had defaulted on term loans of Rs 115 crore that were disbursed to it in 2019. Ajmera is also the resolution professional of insolvent Wadia group airline, Go First.

More than one in five young people in China are jobless. The government casts much of the blame on the job seekers themselves, insisting that their expectations have gotten too high, the Wall Street Journal reported. Young people need to stiffen their spines and embrace hardship, says leader Xi Jinping, who labored in the countryside in China’s Cultural Revolution. If they can’t find jobs they want, they should work on factory lines or engage in poverty relief in rural China. The government’s guidance is ringing hollow with many young people.