China

Chinese brokerages are boosting capital to protect against a market plunge that threatens the value of $640 billion worth of shares pledged as collateral. Securities firms have extended more than a third of China’s stock-backed loans, which may go sour and force lenders to offload the shares, Bloomberg News reported. To cushion themselves, at least three of the country’s biggest brokerages have announced capital raising plans in recent months, joining the nation’s big banks in strengthening buffers.

Chinese stocks are among the world’s worst performers this year. An economy that’s growing at its slowest pace since 2009 and the U.S.-China trade war are certainly dragging them down, but there’s an even bigger problem: The private sector—businesses not owned or controlled by the state—is broke, Bloomberg News reported. The government has initiated programs to keep businesses afloat, but they’re unlikely to be enough. The cash crunch is a side effect of Beijing’s recent attempts to curb risky financial behaviors.

Real estate price growth is slowing and bond defaults are rising, but this isn’t the time to short China’s big property companies. China Evergrande Group, the short sellers’ favorite punt until they were burned by a rebound, is now back in their sights, a Bloomberg View reported. The developer’s shares are down 37 percent from an October 2017 peak, and its dollar bonds are just coming off record lows. But a groaning debt load doesn’t tell the whole story.

Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan was welcomed in Beijing with full honours and promises of support but hopes of Chinese help to rescue the country from a looming balance of payments crisis were dented by the conspicuous absence of any concrete announcement of generous aid, the Financial Times reported. Pakistan is seeking its 13th bailout since the 1980s from the International Monetary Fund. An IMF delegation is expected to visit Islamabad this week to begin discussions on a crucially important new loan to help avert crisis.

Investors are bracing for more debt defaults among China’s cash-squeezed real estate developers as funding costs surge and refinancing pressure intensifies. Borrowing costs in dollars for China’s high-yield issuers, most of whom are property developers, almost doubled this year to 11.2 percent, the highest in about four years, ICE BofAML indexes show. To make things worse, the sector faces a record $18 billion bond maturities in both onshore and offshore markets in the first quarter of 2019, Bloomberg News reported.

China’s domestic investors are more bearish than their overseas counterparts because confusing policy signals have convinced them the government is favoring state enterprises over private companies, Bloomberg News reported. That’s according to a Citigroup Inc. report from Oct. 31 which says entrepreneurs see government policies "turning left" in favor of state enterprises even as officials profess to "turn right" in support of private companies and further reform and opening up.

China’s HNA Group is looking to sell one of its prized regional airlines to a state-owned competitor, as debt woes threaten the core operations of the indebted airline-to-finance conglomerate, the Financial Times reported. The sale would mark the first formal divestment of a core domestic aviation business, a step HNA executives had vowed the group would not take but highlights the challenge of handling debts of at least $78bn accumulated during its rapid expansion.

It’s never been easy to figure out where China’s government ends and the private sector begins, but the dividing line is getting increasingly blurry as the nation’s stock market sinks, Bloomberg News reported. At least 47 non-state companies in China have disclosed plans to sell stakes to government-backed investors in 2018, company filings compiled by Bloomberg show. The pace of such deals accelerated in recent months as the country’s $3.2 trillion equity rout squeezed company founders who pledged their stakes as collateral for loans.

Chinese equities have already lost $3 trillion in market value since January, and hopes for better days ahead are fading, Bloomberg News reported. Anyone counting on a breather in this year’s final stretch got slapped with another 7.9 percent drop for the Shanghai Composite Index so far in October. That sets the gauge up for one of its worst annual performances ever, behind a 65 percent meltdown at the height of the global financial crisis in 2008, and nearing the 22 percent slumps seen in 2011 and 1994. China ranks among the world’s worst places to own shares in 2018.

China’s economic growth continued to slow in October, a period in which the trade conflict with the U.S. has intensified and policy makers have stepped up support for businesses, Bloomberg News reported. That’s the signal from a Bloomberg Economics gauge aggregating the earliest-available indicators on business conditions and market sentiment. The government effort to stabilize the mood among executives and investors hasn’t been effective yet.