The Reserve Bank of India will undertake closer scrutiny and auditing of shadow lenders and large urban co-operative banks in a bid to improve supervision of the financial sector, Bloomberg News reported. The central bank will implement risk-based audits at shadow lenders and urban co-operative banks that focus on localized lending, Governor Shaktikanta Das said Friday. It will also harmonize guidelines relating to the appointment of auditors across all types of lenders.

Creditors of China’s Yongcheng Coal & Electricity Holding Group Co have agreed to repayment plans for two commercial paper issues after the state-owned miner defaulted on them in late November, underwriters said on Friday, Reuters reported. Defaults by highly rated Chinese state firms including Yongcheng caught the world’s second-largest bond market off guard last month and prompted speculation that Beijing may be renewing a deleveraging push interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

China’s fast growing $15tn onshore bond market has been rattled by a wave of defaults by state-owned enterprises that threaten to expose systemic weaknesses across the financial system of the world’s second-largest economy, the Financial Times reported. More bond defaults are expected to follow as Beijing has indicated that it is no longer prepared to help state-owned debtors that run into trouble. But the ending of China’s deeply entrenched system of implicit government guarantees has left investors struggling to price credit risks.

Global debt is set to reach $200 trillion, or 265% of the world’s annual economic output, by the end of the year, S&P Global has forecast - although it doesn’t expect a crisis any time soon, Reuters reported. The credit ratings giant said it amounted to a 14-point rise as a percentage of world GDP, having been amplified by both the economic plunge caused by COVID and the extra borrowing that governments, firms and households have had to resort to. “Global debt-to-GDP has been trending up for many years; the pandemic simply exacerbated the rise,” S&P’s report said.

Japan should consider creating a safety net for companies that may need help surviving the hit from the coronavirus pandemic, such as airlines and transportation firms, said Heizo Takenaka, a close aide to premier Yoshihide Suga, Reuters reported. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) also may need to support financial institutions if they suffer huge losses from big bailouts, said Takenaka, who as economic minister battled Japan’s domestic banking crisis in the late 1990s.

Rising defaults by China’s state firms are showing the need for bond investors to be much savvier about those borrowers -- no easy feat in a country where government decisions and business operations lack transparency, Bloomberg News reported. Five state-linked companies -- from a coal miner to a top chipmaker and an auto firm with ties to BMW AG -- have defaulted for the first time in the onshore bond market this year. That’s the most since 2016.

In a short Twitter thread last month, Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the IMF and past president of the American Economic Association, reassessed how the economic effects of the pandemic had played out compared with what he had expected, the Financial Times reported. One striking observation was: “I expected a lot of inefficient bankruptcies, due to high debt rather than lack of viability post covid. This . . . does not seem to be the case. The proportion of low productivity firms in bankruptcies appears to be roughly the same as usual.” Blanchard is, of course, right.

The shares of Chinese property developers have been a short seller’s nightmare for more than a decade. Nothing seemed able to dent the rally. That has now begun to change, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. Superficially, October was good for Chinese real estate. A rebound in activity pushed new home sales by floor area to their highest levels in recent months. Investment rose 13 per cent while property sales jumped 15 per cent. New construction starts grew 3.5 per cent, compared with a decline in the previous month.

AirAsia X Bhd expects the outcome of its ongoing scheme of arrangement under its debt restructuring exercise to inject fresh equity will only be known by the end of June next year, The Edge Markets reported. The long-haul budget airline said this when announcing to Bursa Malaysia today that it was changing its financial year-end to June 30, 2021, from Dec 31, 2020. AirAsia X said the outcome would not be known by this month so the basis of preparation of its audited financial statements and audit opinion (AFS) was uncertain and the AFS would be of limited value to shareholders.

Chinese industrial activity has snapped back to pre-coronavirus growth levels, with factory surveys hitting multi-year highs in November, but the headline expansion masks struggles for smaller firms and looming pressures for exporters, Reuters reported. Readings from the official and Caixin’s Purchasing Managers Indexes hit three- and 10-year highs respectively last month, a reflection of the industrial sector’s strong overall recovery. Official data also shows industrial profits for large firms grew at their fastest pace since 2017 in October.