China

In a stock market where investors are used to being disappointed, Tuesday’s plunge still shocked, Bloomberg News reported. China’s benchmark equity gauge sank almost 5 percent at one point and by the close, the escalating tensions with the U.S. had sent 1,023 stocks down by the daily 10 percent limit -- or more than one in four. Greasing the losses was the Shanghai Composite Index’s slide below 3,000, a level previously breached during market crashes in 2015 and 2016.

China’s top leaders have agreed to help debt-laden conglomerate HNA Group Co raise funds, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. A senior official at the People's Bank of China, on Tuesday, led a meeting with three regulators, the Hainan provincial government, HNA's co-chairman Chen Feng and the company's biggest creditor, asking the attendees to support HNA's future bond issues, Reuters reported on a Bloomberg News story.

China’s government has been trying to break the country’s addiction to ever-rising debt, but its effort to crack down on easy money is starting to hit growth in the world’s second-biggest economy, the International New York Times reported. Beijing has been concerned in recent years about the increased reliance on credit to keep the economy expanding briskly, worrying that it could lead to a financial crisis, or to a long period of stagnation like the one in Japan after the real estate market burst in the early 1990s.

A unit of China’s state-owned conglomerate CITIC has filed a request for antitrust approval to take full control over Czech assets of troubled private Chinese group CEFC China Energy, Czech competition watchdog UOHS said on Wednesday. The Czech assets involved are the CEFC Europe firm, holding interests in hotels, real estate, engineering and a sports club and Lapasan, through which CEFC holds a majority stake in beer brewer Lobkowicz, Reuters reported. The UOHS did not mention Czech airline Travel Service in which a China-based CEFC entity holds 49.9 percent interest.

Before it led a buyout deal for one of Li Ka-shing’s Hong Kong skyscrapers last year, few had heard of China Energy Reserve & Chemicals Group Co. Now it’s getting famous for the wrong reasons, roiling the $1 trillion Asian dollar-bond market with a default, Bloomberg News reported. China Energy blamed the delinquency on about $2 billion of notes on a “tightening in credit conditions” that most other borrowers have so far weathered while making their payments.

As Angola seeks to attract foreign investors to help diversify its oil-dependent economy, the country’s biggest trading partner, China, looks set to take a leading role, but the considerable leverage it is able to wield may leave Africa’s third-largest economy short-changed, the Financial Times reported. With Angola heavily indebted to China, Beijing may drive some hard bargains, as has happened in south Asian countries deeply in hock to the Chinese.

Russian gold miner Petropavlovsk, which is battling a shareholder attempt to remove its board, has agreed to provide a last minute bridge loan to a Hong Kong iron ore company in which it owns a 31 per cent stake, the Financial Times reported. The London-listed company said it would provide $29.75m to IRC to enable it to meet a June payment on a loan to ICBC, which was used to fund a mine near the border of China. Petropavlovsk also said it is in “advanced” talks with a major Russian bank to refinance the entire $340m project loan.

Beijing’s determination to tame China’s soaring debt levels has won plaudits from bullish observers who believe the government is finally tackling its key economic problem. Why, then, has there been so little stress in the country’s bond market? Defaults on Chinese bonds might appear to have risen sharply this year, in volume terms, The Wall Street Journal reported. A total of 13 issuers have defaulted on a combined 20.2 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) worth of corporate bonds in China’s domestic market in 2018, up 41% from the same period last year, when 11 issuers had defaulted.

The surge in Chinese company bond defaults has overseas investors deciding they need to take a closer look, Bloomberg News reported. Edmund Goh, an Asia fixed-income investment manager at Aberdeen Standard Investments, says he’s planning to take more trips to China to get intelligence that’s hard to gain from afar. Investors can get to see among others, people who work in risk departments at banks, who can tell them how they’re classifying loans, he said. Or corporate treasury executives who may shed some light on their use of shadow banking financing.

Hainan Airlines Holding Co. plans to raise as much as 7 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) by selling shares to investors, including an arm of Singapore state investment company Temasek Holdings Pte., as part of a restructuring planned by the unit of Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co, Bloomberg News reported. The Haikou, Hainan-based carrier is selling up to 20 percent of its Shanghai-listed shares to 10 investors, the company said in a statement on June 9. Proceeds from the sale will be used to fund plane purchases, aviation training, maintenance and airport business.