One of China’s last major developers to have so far avoided defaults amid the nation’s property debt crisis slid in equity and credit markets Tuesday, after canceling a share placement, Bloomberg News reported. Shares of Country Garden Holdings Co., one of China’s largest private-sector developers, fell as much as 11% in their biggest drop this year, and ended down 7.6%. Its closely watched dollar bond due January next year, its nearest such maturity, dropped 2.3 cents Tuesday to 32.5 cents, a level that indicates high uncertainty on repayment.

Chinese ministries, regulators and the central bank on Tuesday pledged more financing support to small businesses, suggesting an urgency among policymakers to revive the private sector amid a flagging economic recovery, Reuters reported. China will encourage financial institutions to offer targeted and diversified financial support to some small and medium-sized enterprises in the manufacturing sector, according to a joint statement by the industry and finance ministries, financial and securities regulators and the central bank.

China's currency regulators are asking some commercial banks to reduce or postpone their purchases of U.S. dollars in order to slow the yuan's depreciation, Reuters reported. The informal instruction, or the so-called window guidance, is the latest in a series of steps taken by authorities this year to bolster a currency that has been hit by China's faltering post-pandemic economic recovery and rising yields for the U.S. dollar and other major currencies.

Signs of deflation are becoming more prevalent across China, heaping extra pressure on Beijing to reignite growth or risk falling into an economic trap it could find hard to escape, the Wall Street Journal reported. While the rest of the world tussles with inflation, China is at risk of experiencing a prolonged spell of falling prices that—if it takes root—could eat into corporate profits, sap consumer spending and push more people out of work. Its effects would ripple across the globe, easing prices for some products that countries like the U.S.

China’s 200-million-strong army of individual investors has turned away from the stock market, the Wall Street Journal reported. The country’s benchmark CSI 300 index lost around a fifth of its value last year, and has risen much less than major indexes in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere in 2023. That is creating a sense of despair among the office workers, civil servants and other ordinary citizens who are responsible for the bulk of trading in China’s stock market.

Growing pessimism about China’s housing market is dragging down the country’s largest surviving developer, which is again struggling to convince investors that it can weather the storm, the Wall Street Journal reported. At the start of this year, investors had regained confidence in Country Garden 2007 4.97%increase; green up pointing triangle, a 31-year-old property giant that benefited from a slew of measures that Chinese authorities rolled out in November to support the real-estate sector.

China’s top housing official urged financial regulators and lenders to strengthen efforts to revive the country’s ailing property sector, Bloomberg News reported. In a recent meeting with property developers and builders, Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Ni Hong called for homebuyers who had paid off previous mortgages to be considered as first-time purchasers, the official Xinhua news agency reported Thursday. Up to now, many buyers in big cities who have a mortgage history but don’t currently own a property are subject to higher down-payment rules.

China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group said on Thursday that it had applied to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to resume trading in the company's shares on Friday, Reuters reported. Trading in the shares of the company, the electric vehicle unit of China Evergrande Group, has been suspended since April 1, 2022, after it got sucked into a debt crisis in mid-2021. Read more.

China’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to a record in the second quarter, although consumers and businesses are borrowing at a slow pace, reflecting low confidence that’s hitting economic growth, Bloomberg News reported. Total debt — combining the household, corporate and government sectors — climbed to 281.5% of gross domestic product in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg’s calculations based on data from China’s central bank and the National Bureau of Statistics. That was up from 279.7% in the first quarter.

China’s central bank called on the financial sector to help fund technology research and M&A deals, the latest in a string of promises to revive a private sector devastated by a two-year regulatory crackdown. A plethora of Beijing officials have in recent weeks talked about measures to prop up private firms, regarded as key to resuscitating a sputtering economy. On Thursday, the central bank asked lenders and financial markets to provide more support for innovation and tech-related acquisitions, and to boost investment in startups.