China Evergrande Group has taken to seeking loans at above-average interest rates in the shadow banking market, where caution even there over its cash flow hints at an increasingly fraught effort to reduce the property sector's biggest debt, Reuters reported. The developer, which owed 835.5 billion yuan ($125 billion) at June-end, has been shopping around for cash among small banks and private trusts at high rates to fund developments, as proposed limits to the permitted size of real estate debt stymie big-bank lending.

Malaysia's AirAsia X Bhd plans to revise its $15.3 billion debt restructuring plan to address concerns raised by a creditor as its cash is running out fast, people with direct knowledge of the matter said, Reuters reported. The budget carrier is seeking to reconstitute the $15.3 billion of unsecured debt into a principal amount of 200 million ringgit ($48 million) and have the rest waived.

Nok Air looks set to be allowed to restructure under court supervision, after nobody raised objections during a court hearing today, according to a 27 October filing to the Stock Exchange of Thailand, FlightGlobal reported. The Thai budget carrier says the order on its business rehabilitation petition will be issued at 09:00 on 4 November by Thailand’s Central Bankruptcy Court, after which Nok will provide further details to the stock exchange. The court had accepted the company’s petition on 30 July and set the hearing for 27 October.

ANA Holdings Inc. forecast its biggest-ever operating loss of 505 billion yen ($4.8 billion) for the fiscal year through March 2021, the latest airline to face an existential threat to its business due to the pandemic, Bloomberg News reported.…The outlook issued by ANA calls for a wider full-year loss than the 376 billion yen analysts were projecting on average, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. ANA also forecast 740 billion yen in revenue for the fiscal year through March, compared with analysts’ average prediction for 926 billion yen.

As Chinese official slogans go, “one bank, one policy” may lack the revolutionary fervor of “let a hundred flowers bloom” or “smash the four olds.” But don’t be fooled by the bureaucratic banality of this mantra recently adopted by China’s banking regulator. Its patchwork one-bank, one-policy approach to a cascade of regional bank failures could trigger a wider financial crisis in the world’s second largest economy, Bloomberg News reported in a commentary.

The proportion of emerging market high-yield companies who have seen their liquidity position weaken in September has climbed back to June’s record high, with firms in Latin America driving the overall increase, Moody’s said in a research report, Reuters reported. The reading of Moody’s emerging markets liquidity stress indicator returned to an all-time high of 25.8% last month - up 1 percentage point from August and compared with its long-term average of just under 20%, Moody’s found. A rising trend indicates upward pressure on default rates.

Sovereign default risks are on course to rise further in 2021, with Iraq, Sri Lanka, Angola and Gabon at high probability of default, say Goldman Sachs analysts, Reuters reported. Five sovereign debt defaults or distressed debt exchanges - in which investors swap their debt for new bonds, often with longer maturities and a reduced value - have already happened in 2020 in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, the most in around two decades.

AirAsia X Bhd (AAX) said BOC Aviation Ltd has applied to intervene in the airline's application to the High Court in respect of its proposed RM63.49 billion debt restructuring scheme, confirming a report by The Edge. In a filing with the bourse, AAX said it is making the clarification in reference to an article by The Edge dated Oct 26 entitled "More hurdles loom over AirAsia X's debt restructuring plan,” The Edge reported.

To understand why some of China Evergrande Group’s strategic investors agreed to throw the embattled developer a $13 billion lifeline last month, look no further than their own sources of revenue, Bloomberg News reported. Interior decorator Grandland Group Holdings Co.’s listed unit gets almost 58% of its sales from Evergrande. Hangzhou Robam Appliances’s sales jumped after deepening its cooperation with Evergrande. And the developer has been the largest source of revenue for door maker Beijing Jiayu over the last four years, according to company filings.

In a related story, the Financial Times reported that over the past two decades, China has emerged as the biggest bilateral lender to Africa, transferring nearly $150bn to governments and state-owned companies as it sought to secure commodity supplies and develop its global network of infrastructure projects, the Belt and Road Initiative.