China

China’s legions of regional banks are feeling the strain. The country’s two-year crackdown on risky financing and the trade war with the U.S. have slowed economic growth, triggering debt defaults that are exposing them as the weakest link in the credit chain, Bloomberg News reported. Several lenders have fallen into deep trouble this year, with others -- perhaps many -- expected to follow. What’s different is that China seems to have thrown out the old playbook of injecting state funds into struggling lenders to keep them alive.

New bank lending in China likely slowed in July, a Reuters poll showed, reinforcing expectations that policymakers will need to announce more support measures in coming months to stabilize the cooling economy as U.S. trade pressure builds, Reuters reported. The rapidly worsening trade dispute, rising borrowing costs, and this week’s sudden drop in the yuan have fanned worries that the world’s second-largest economy could face a sharper slowdown. But policymakers are also increasingly worried about rising debt and financial risks, particularly in the property market.

Beijing’s decision to let the renminbi fall below the symbolic level of 7 to the dollar was a political choice — but it would not be in China’s economic interests to “weaponise” its currency, economists say, the Financial Times reported. Monday’s move to increase the renminbi’s trading band came as a retaliation against the latest US threat of fresh tariffs. And although China’s central bank took steps to stabilise the currency on Tuesday, investors worry that the authorities could seek to put pressure on Washington by allowing a bigger devaluation.

Pessimism among global businesses has risen sharply in the third quarter of the year as US-China trade tensions, the slowing Eurozone economy, and the rising chances of a no-deal Brexit spook firms, City A.M. reported. The quarterly global risk survey from Oxford Economics, released today, showed that 19 per cent of companies think a deterioration in the global economy is highly likely, compared to seven per cent in the second quarter.

The biggest slide in China’s yuan since 2015 threatens to revive concerns about the capital flight back then that helped spur the country to spend $1 trillion of its reserves. For all its perceived success in tightening regulations and strengthening scrutiny of funds moving abroad, the trauma of that period poses a big reason to avoid any continuous depreciation, Bloomberg News reported. An even more-important financial consideration could be the stockpile of Chinese dollar debt, which has more than doubled since the end of 2015 to $729.8 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Stock investors have never been so downbeat on the world’s biggest banks. China’s “big four” state-owned lenders, which together control more than $14 trillion of assets, have tumbled to record-low valuations amid mounting concern that Beijing will encourage them to bail out smaller peers, Bloomberg News reported. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world’s largest lender by assets, lost $11 billion of market value last week after injecting capital into a troubled regional bank as part of a government-orchestrated rescue.

China onshore corporate bond defaults reached at least 14.4 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) from 14 notes in July, the highest level since the March peak, Bloomberg News reported. This brings the total year-to-date defaults to 70.9 billion yuan from 89 bonds. Real estate sector with 10.2b yuan defaults tops year-to-date default list, followed by wholesale (9.5b yuan) and retail sales sector (7.9b yuan). Investment companies topped last month’s defaults, accounting for 45% of monthly total amount. Jiangsu, Anhui provinces and Shanghai City were among the top 3 default locations.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is the "last hope" for Africa's most advanced economy, but his government must turn incentive policies into laws to secure more Chinese investment, a senior Chinese diplomat told Reuters, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. China is South Africa's largest trading partner and has pledged more investment than any other country since Ramaphosa embarked on a drive last year to attract $100 billion of new investment to lift the economy out of a slump.

When a lender suffers from a run on deposits or a funding crisis, one solution is a central-bank takeover. The People’s Bank of China, however, is finding that option has shut, a Bloomberg View reported. Two months after the PBOC seized Baoshang Bank Co., China’s first such move in two decades, regulators have another troubled situation on their hands. On Sunday, Bank of Jinzhou Co., a small regional lender in the rust belt province of Liaoning, got a partial bailout from three state-owned asset managers.

China’s Bank of Jinzhou, which suspended trading in its shares earlier this year and saw its auditor quit, said on Thursday that it is in talks with multiple parties for possible strategic investment, and that it is operating normally, Reuters reported. The statement on the bank’s website triggered fresh jitters about the health of smaller banks in China’s northeast, after regulators took over Inner Mongolia-based Baoshang Bank on May 24, rattling China’s interbank markets and sending some firms’ borrowing costs spiking.