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.

Developing countries in Africa are losing a champion that for years allowed them to borrow at cheaper rates than they could find in capital markets, Bloomberg News reported. China, Africa’s largest bilateral creditor, has been scaling back lending in the region amid its worsening growth woes. That comes at a time of rising interest rates globally and shrinking liquidity, factors that have already sent bonds of the riskiest African borrowers such as Ghana and Zambia crashing, and currencies including South Africa’s rand to near pandemic lows.

China's central bank has asked major state-owned banks to be prepared to sell dollars for the local unit in offshore markets as it steps up efforts to stem the yuan's descent, Reuters reported. State banks were told to ask their offshore branches, including those based in Hong Kong, New York and London, to review their holdings of the offshore yuan and ensure U.S. dollar reserves are ready to be deployed.

China has spent a trillion dollars to expand its influence across Asia, Africa and Latin America through its Belt and Road infrastructure program. Now, Beijing is working on an overhaul of the troubled initiative, according to people involved in policy-making, the Wall Street Journal reported. A slowing global economy, combined with rising interest rates and higher inflation, have left countries struggling to repay their debts to China. Tens of billions of dollars of loans have gone sour, and numerous development projects have stalled.