China

A worsening crisis in China’s property market is dragging junk dollar bonds from the nation’s borrowers deeper into distress, as the implosion of what was once one of the world’s most-profitable bond trades sends ripples across trading floors, Bloomberg News reported. Anyone who had been expecting a market turnaround from the 20th Communist Party congress which started Sunday has been left grappling with a further grind lower in China’s offshore credit market this week.

The three countries that helped Moscow to maintain crude exports in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine appear to be stepping back into the market for Russian barrels, with Turkey taking a lead role in the latest buying, Bloomberg News reported. A marked increase in the volume of crude on tankers that have yet to signal a final destination makes the task of monitoring Russia’s exports more complicated, but most of those vessels end up in India, with a smaller number heading further east to China.

China's central bank rolled over maturing medium-term policy loans while keeping the interest rate unchanged for a second month on Monday, largely in line with market expectations, Reuters reported. The People's Bank of China (PBOC) said that it was keeping the rate on 500 billion yuan ($69.55 billion) worth of one-year medium-term lending facility (MLF) loans to some financial institutions unchanged at 2.75% from the previous operation.

When China Evergrande Group began struggling under a mountain of debt last year, it quietly set off a chain reaction across the country, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chinese authorities prevented a disorderly collapse of the real-estate colossus, but Evergrande’s distress has spread across China’s housing market and many related industries. The situation has worsened this year into what is now a full-blown property downturn that has become a major drag on China’s economy.

Defaults among emerging market companies continued to pile up in the third quarter due to troubles in Russia as well as China's property sector, with the volume of bonds trading at distressed levels close to record highs, JPMorgan said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The year-to-date default rate for emerging market high-yield firms reached 10.3%, the bank found in its latest default monitor. This was driven by Russian defaults lifting the rate in emerging Europe to 21.7%, while China's property sector woes saw the default rate across Asia run to 12.8%.

New bank lending in China nearly doubled in September from the previous month and far exceeded expectations after the central bank acted to spur an economy weakened by a property crisis and a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, Reuters reported. Chinese banks extended 2.47 trillion yuan ($344.58 billion) in new yuan loans in September, jumping from 1.25 trillion yuan in August, data released by the People's Bank of China showed on Tuesday. Analysts polled by Reuters had predicted new yuan loans would rise to 1.80 trillion yuan in September.

The main units of China SCE Group Holdings Ltd. and Shimao Group Holdings Ltd. missed payments on 1.6 billion yuan ($225 million) of trust borrowings, adding to a string of defaults by Chinese developers as the industry’s liquidity crunch spreads, Bloomberg News reported. Xiamen Zhongjun Industrial Co., a unit of SCE and one of the guarantors, failed to repay its 50% share of a trust product that was due at the end of September, according to documents sent by the issuer Everbright Trust Co. to the product distributor that were seen by Bloomberg News.

When Suriname couldn’t make its debt payments, a Chinese state bank seized the money from one of the South American country’s accounts, the New York Times reported. As Pakistan has struggled to cope with a devastating flood that has inundated a third of the country, its loan repayments to China have been rising fast. When Kenyans and Angolans went to the polls in presidential elections in August, the countries’ Chinese loans, and how to repay them, were a hot-button political issue.

Chinese refiners are likely to boost refined oil products exports in the last two months of 2022 and into early 2023 after receiving the biggest allocation from Beijing this year, trade sources and analysts said on Monday, Reuters reported. The increase in Chinese exports is likely to help stabilise global oil markets and partly replace supplies from Russia which will be hit by European Union embargoes in coming months. It also allows the world's No.

China’s central government offered a rare tax incentive for residential purchases, ramping up support for the country’s embattled real estate sector, Bloomberg News reported. Residents who buy new homes within one year after selling old homes will enjoy refunds for personal-income tax on the sale, according to a statement on the finance ministry website. The tax refunds will take effect from October till the end of 2023. The novel tax policy comes after a yearlong slump in the housing market.