A cyberattack on Ireland’s health system has paralyzed the country’s health services for a week, cutting off access to patient records, delaying Covid-19 testing, and forcing cancellations of medical appointments, the New York Times reported. Using ransomware, which is malware that encrypts a victims’ data until they pay a ransom, the people behind the attack have been holding hostage the data at Ireland’s publicly funded health care system, the Health Service Executive. The attack forced the H.S.E. to shut down its entire information technology system.
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Concern over China Huarong Asset Management Co.’s financial health is deepening among domestic investors, threatening to worsen a selloff offshore, Bloomberg News reported. The firm’s thinly traded 19 billion yuan note due 2022 fell 12% to 70.2 yuan on Thursday, according to Bloomberg-compiled data, while its 3.54% domestic bond maturing in November dropped 24% to 75.3 yuan, both on pace for record lows. The company’s dollar bonds also declined, with a 3.75% bond due 2022 falling 5.5 cents on the dollar to 73.6 cents, its weakest level in more than a month.
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China is — yet again — looking to deal with its mountain of hidden debt. An absurd solution has emerged: just make it go away. But much like a landfill, it won’t ever quite disappear, according to a Bloomberg commentary. Earlier this month, Zhao Quanhou, a top researcher at the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences, which is affiliated with the finance ministry, proposed that Beijing should dissolve some of its off-balance sheet debt by converting it into legal, or statutory, debt.
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BlackRock gave it money. So did Goldman Sachs. Foreign investors had good reason to trust Huarong, the sprawling Chinese financial conglomerate. Even as its executives showed a perilous appetite for risky borrowing and lending, the investors believed they could depend on Beijing to bail out the state-owned company if things ever got too dicey, the New York Times reported. Now some of those same foreign investors may need to think twice. Huarong is more than $40 billion in debt to foreign and domestic investors and shows signs of stumbling.
Global banks are losing share in the $186 billion lending market for Chinese borrowers offshore, falling behind local rivals boosting their presence just as the nation’s corporate sector recovers from the pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. Their portion of such lending has steadily dropped over the past decade, hitting 37% so far this year to May 17, well below the 11-year average of 51%, according to Bloomberg-compiled data. Last year the share fell to 29%, the lowest since at least 2010.
China’s economic activity grew at a slower pace in April as retail sales missed expectations, complicating the picture of a steady and balanced recovery in the world’s second-largest economy, the Wall Street Journal reported. Official data released Monday showed industrial output and fixed-asset investment beating market expectations and continuing to lead the recovery, but domestic consumer spending, which has lagged behind for months, remaining soft.
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China’s central bank injected medium-term cash into the financial system, in a push to keep borrowing costs low as the economy recovers from the virus pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. The People’s Bank of China added 100 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) of one-year funds with its medium-term lending facility on Monday, matching the amount coming due in a move that was expected by analysts. The authorities kept the interest rate unchanged at 2.95%.
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China’s factory-gate prices jumped by the most in 3½ years in April, driven by surging commodities prices, raising concerns that inflationary pressures could spread globally, the Wall Street Journal reported. The country’s consumer-price index, a measure of inflation that tracks prices for a basket of goods and services, rose 0.9% in April from a year earlier, reaching a seven-month high. The producer-price index, a gauge of factory-gate prices, rose 6.8% last month, the fastest pace since October 2017, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday.
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For decades, France’s Valdunes SAS charged premium prices for the wheels it made for high-speed trains and other rail systems around the world. That strategy changed after a Chinese state-owned industrial conglomerate bought the company in 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new owner, Maanshan Iron & Steel Co. , or MA Steel, slashed prices in a bid to dominate the market. “We were told that we shouldn’t miss a single order. That was explicit,” recalled Jérôme Duchange, Valdunes’s former top executive in France.
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The European Union unveiled draft rules on Wednesday aimed at cracking down on state-subsidized foreign companies in Europe, a move that could allow regulators to pursue big Chinese companies in much the same way they have targeted U.S. multinationals such as Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported. The legislation is the latest sign of Europe’s shifting stance toward China, the bloc’s biggest trading partner for goods and a crucial market for its exporters.
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