The Bank of Japan kept its interest-rate targets unchanged Wednesday despite strong pressure from investors on the bank’s new 0.5% cap for the 10-year government bond yield, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Japanese central bank decided to leave short-term interest rates at minus 0.1% and its target for the 10-year Japanese government bond yield at around zero. The bank reiterated that it intends to cap that yield at 0.5%. In a surprise move on Dec. 20, the BOJ lifted the cap to 0.5% from the previous ceiling of 0.25%. While Gov.

Economists said China’s shrinking population poses a major future challenge for the world’s second-largest economy, while President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser sought Tuesday to restore investor confidence after one of the most disappointing growth rates in decades, the Wall Street Journal reported. China has already rolled back the zero-Covid policies that restrained growth for much of 2022, setting the stage for a recovery this year.

Japan is urging the world’s regulators to treat crypto as strictly as they do banks, adding to the calls for tougher rules following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX digital-asset exchange, Bloomberg News reported. “Crypto has become this big,” Mamoru Yanase, deputy director-general of the Financial Services Agency’s Strategy Development and Management Bureau, said in an interview.

The Bank of Japan is under pressure to revise policy again at its meeting ending Wednesday after investors repeatedly attacked the central bank’s new 0.5% cap for the 10-year government bond yield, the Wall Street Journal reported. The battle between the BOJ and the markets has upended what are expected to be the final months of Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda‘s decade in the job. He has devoted his term to keeping interest rates ultralow, a policy that many market players believe is likely to end this year with inflation in Japan nearing 4%.

China's Country Garden had some rare good news for the cash-squeezed property sector with an offshore debt repayment on Tuesday, but a closer look reveals just how much developers may still struggle to access capital, developers and analysts said, Reuters reported. China's largest developer by sales said it repaid its 4.75% dollar bonds with outstanding principal totalling $625 million. The payment was due on Tuesday.

The co-founders of failed cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital are now courting investors for a new venture that looks to capitalize on a growing list of bankruptcies in the space, CNBC.com reported. Kyle Davies and Su Zhu are listed as founding members in a pitch deck obtained by CNBC for a distressed debt marketplace called GTX. Davies and Zhu founded Three Arrows Capital, a once $10 billion Singapore-based hedge fund that filed for bankruptcy in July.

China's economy slowed sharply in the fourth quarter due to stringent COVID curbs, dragging down 2022 growth to one of its worst in nearly half a century and raising pressure on policymakers to unveil more stimulus this year, Reuters reported. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew 2.9% in October-December from a year earlier, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Tuesday, slower than the third-quarter's 3.9% pace. The rate still exceeded the second quarter's 0.4% expansion and market expectations of a 1.8% gain.

Chinese financial regulators and the nation’s biggest bad-debt management companies plan to offer as much as 160 billion yuan ($24 billion) of refinancing support to high-quality developers in the first quarter, Bloomberg News reported. Under the plan first announced on Friday with little details, the People’s Bank of China will channel 80 billion yuan of loans through China Huarong Asset Management Co. and its peers to selected developers at an annual rate of 1.75%, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private.

China Evergrande Group said PwC resigned as its auditor on Monday, adding to the pressure on the developer at the epicenter of China’s property crisis, Bloomberg News reported. Evergrande’s board recommended the resignation of PwC after the two firms couldn’t “agree on the timetable and the scope of work in respect of the assessment on the group’s going concern basis,” as well as the “procedures required for the assets impairment assessment,” according to a regulatory filing. In its Jan.

A judge in Connecticut has placed tighter restrictions on Chinese businessman and media entrepreneur Guo Wengui and his followers to end what she described as an alleged campaign of online and in-person harassment directed at a court-appointed trustee and others involved in his chapter 11 case, Reuters reported.