February 9 China Eases Property Loan Curbs as Housing Market Slumps China eased a year-long cap on loans for the real estate sector to fund public rental housing, the latest bid by authorities to tackle a slumping property market, Bloomberg News reported. Bank loans to fund low-cost rental projects will no longer be subject to regulatory curbs, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on Tuesday. The rules required banks to trim their loan exposure to the property sector to a certain level.

Tax havens could come in the way of cross-border insolvency laws, with Videocon Oil and Nirav Modi's Firestar International, two recent examples of Indian companies owning foreign assets that are undergoing insolvency proceedings in the country, demonstrating why this is so, said legal, insolvency and banking experts, the Economic Times of India reported. Videocon Oil has assets in Brazil and Indonesia, owned through intermediate companies located in jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Cayman Islands.

Jury selection is expected to begin on Monday in the U.S. corruption trial of a former Goldman Sachs banker accused of involvement in the looting of billions of dollars from Malaysia's 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, Reuters reported. Roger Ng, Goldman's former head of investment banking in Malaysia, has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to violate an anti-bribery law and launder money in connection with the alleged looting of billions of dollars from the fund.

The United States and Japan are set to announce a deal to grant Japanese steelmakers relief from Trump-era U.S. tariffs for a limited amount of steel imports, Reuters reported. Anonymous sources said that it will allow about 1.25 million metric tonnes into the United States duty-free, with volumes above that level subject to the 25% "Section 232" national security tariffs.

Turkey is preparing to return to global bond markets for the first time since the lira’s implosion, Bloomberg News reported. The nation has picked banks including HSBC Holdings Plc to manage a sale of Islamic debt, known as a sukuk, which could happen this month. The sale may be used to refinance about $2 billion of debt maturing this month. The last time Turkey turned to foreign investors with a bond sale was in September, before President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s insistence on cutting interest rates despite high inflation sent the currency into a tailspin.

The Chinese government could take further measures if needed to keep the yuan stable, potentially putting downward pressure on the currency, a former foreign exchange regulator said, Reuters reported. Policymakers could increase yuan's flexibility, expand capital outflows, or control capital inflows to rein in the yuan, which could deviate from economic fundamentals in the short term, wrote Guan Tao, global chief economist at BOC International and a former official at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE).

Candidates seeking to succeed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said they will continue to push for better infrastructure, pitching to prioritize areas outside the capital and for companies to build more while government debt remains high, Bloomberg News reported. At the first presidential forum on Friday, Manila Mayor Isko Moreno and Senator Panfilo Lacson said they will boost public-private partnerships, which Duterte earlier criticized but eventually adopted. The Southeast Asian nation is banking on infrastructure spending to help boost pandemic recovery.

India’s central bank rejected bids for bonds at the weekly auction following a surge in yields spurred by the government’s record-borrowing program, Bloomberg News reported. The Reserve Bank of India didn’t accept any bids for the 2026 and 2035 bonds at Friday’s auction, as traders probably asked for higher yields. It sold only 105.3 billion rupees ($1.4 billion) of notes, compared with 240 billion rupees on offer, the RBI said in a statement.

Ecuador expects to pull together a trade deal with China at the end of this year and will begin formal debt re-negotiations with the Asian country, Ecuadorean President Guillermo Lasso said on Saturday, after a Beijing visit with his counterpart Xi Jinping, Reuters reported. China became Ecuador's top lender over the last decade, with millions of dollars in long-term credit tied to the handover of crude oil, large investments in hydro-electric and mining projects and other loans. "In China we had a productive meeting with the President Xi Jinping," Lasso posted on Twitter.

Lenders to Future Retail, the company being fought over by Reliance Industries and Amazon.com Inc , have told India's Supreme Court that its assets should be put up for auction after it missed payments, Reuters reported. They also said they have started classifying loans to the country's second-largest retailer as non-performing and would have to make combined provisions of 80 billion-90 billion rupees ($1.1 billion-$1.2 billion) due to the non-payment.