The United States will continue to be a "very generous" donor of humanitarian aid to the Afghan people and will aim to prevent any of its assistance from passing through Taliban coffers, State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Friday, Reuters reported. "We can maintain a humanitarian commitment to ... the Afghan people in ways that does not have any funding or assistance pass through the coffers of a central government," he told reporters.

Fugitive Indian businessman Vijay Mallya has filed papers in the UK high court seeking permission to appeal against his bankruptcy order, the Times of India reported. Mallya was declared bankrupt by the insolvency and companies court (ICC) of the high court on July 26 this year. His name is now listed in the individual insolvency register. A spokesman for the chancery division of the high court told TOI that Mallya had on August 16 filed a notice seeking permission to appeal the decision of Chief ICC judge Briggs, who had declared him bankrupt.

Centerra Gold Inc.’s units on Wednesday filed a motion in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court seeking penalties of $1 million a day against the Kyrgyzstan government, related to the seizure of the Canadian company’s Kumtor gold mine, Reuters reported. Centerra Gold said in May, its Kyrgyzstan units Kumtor Gold Co. (KGC) and Kumtor Operating Co. (KOC) commenced bankruptcy proceedings in a U.S. court following nationalization of the miner’s Kumtor gold mine by the former Soviet republic.

South Korea became the first major Asian economy to raise interest rates Thursday, with more hikes in the pipeline as its central bank indicated that financial risks pose a bigger threat to the economy than the latest virus outbreak, Bloomberg News reported. Governor Lee Ju-yeol said the quarter-percentage-point hike to 0.75% still left rates in an accommodative position that supports the economy. He added that the current delta wave is having less of a negative impact on growth as consumers adjusted behavior to the new normal of the pandemic.

Afghanistan's banks, critical to the country's recovery from crisis, are facing an uncertain future say its bankers, with doubts over everything from liquidity to employment of female staff after the Taliban swept to power, Reuters reported. Banks were expected to reopen imminently, a Taliban spokesman said on Tuesday, after they were closed for some ten days and the financial system ground to a halt as the Western-backed government collapsed amid the pullout of U.S. and allied troops.

The finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday announced that she has asked state-run banks to step up lending and hold outreach programmes or loans melas across India from October to lend to desirable borrowers, in order to give momentum to the stimulus package. Sitharaman said that it was too early say that there is lack of credit demand in the economy, the Economic Times of India reported. “This year too sometime in October, there will be a credit outreach in every district of the country,” the finance minister said.

Thailand is less vulnerable to any spike in global bond yields stemming from policy normalization by the U.S. Federal Reserve due to its low reliance on external sources for debt financing and its high foreign reserves, the Bank of Thailand chief said, Bloomberg News reported. Bond yields in Thailand would be less exposed to “another taper tantrum” than those in some other emerging economies, Governor Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput told a virtual conference Wednesday organized by the Stock Exchange of Thailand.

The highly-infectious Delta variant has shut down factories in largely unvaccinated parts of Asia, throttling supply chains and contributing to rising consumer prices at a time when many thought the worst of Covid-19 supply disruptions were in the past, the Wall Street Journal reported. A gap has formed between the demand for goods in the well vaccinated U.S. and the capacity of sparsely vaccinated manufacturing countries to meet it, building inflationary pressure.

The World Bank said on Tuesday that it had halted disbursements of aid money to Afghanistan as it assesses how the Taliban plan to rule the country, the New York Times reported. A World Bank spokesperson said that the international development organization is “deeply concerned” about the situation in Afghanistan, particularly the impact that the new leadership will have on women in the country. The bank plans to monitor how the leadership transition proceeds and consult with the international community.

South Korea’s ballooning household debt set new records last quarter, offering support for views that the central bank will raise interest rates as early as this week to deflate a debt bubble, Bloomberg News reported. Total credit extended to households jumped 10.3% from a year earlier to 1,806 trillion won ($1.54 trillion), according to a Bank of Korea statement on Tuesday. The 169 trillion won increase marked the largest gain since data going back to 2003. From the previous three months, credit rose by 41.2 trillion won, the biggest increase for an April-June quarter.