Chinese aviation-to-finance conglomerate HNA defaulted on a Rmb300m ($44m) loan raised through a trust company, the lender said on Thursday as it sought to freeze HNA assets, the Financial Times reported. The announcement by Hunan Trust is a sign that HNA’s liquidity woes are beginning to have a broader impact outside China’s formal banking sector. The company is already under strict supervision by a group of bank creditors, led by China Development Bank, following a liquidity crunch in the final quarter of last year.

China agreed to extend a $5 billion credit line to cash-strapped Venezuela, said the Venezuelan finance minister, as President Nicolas Maduro headed to Beijing. Minister Simon Zerpa told Bloomberg News that Venezuela would pay back the loan with either cash or oil, Bloomberg News reported. The countries were expected to sign what Zerpa described as a strategic alliance on gold mining. “Venezuela has a great alliance with China,” Zerpa said on Thursday.

Rating agency S&P has downgraded seven Chinese local-government financing vehicles (LGFVs), on the view that local governments are less likely to provide bailouts if these companies verge towards default, highlighting the punishing impact of Beijing’s austerity campaign, the Financial Times reported. For the last decade, Chinese local governments have used such off-budget vehicles to finance infrastructure projects that skirt restrictions on direct borrowing, prompting warnings from global watchdogs and China’s finance ministry. In 2014, China’s parliament legalised dire

China’s policy makers are stuck with the most bearish equity market in years as their attempts to lift sentiment fail to gain traction, Reuters reported. The Shanghai Composite Index slid Wednesday to within 10 points of its lowest intraday level since 2014, ignoring an article in the Securities Daily expressing support for the market and suggesting value investors should start buying. The benchmark made a brief upward foray mid-morning and then retreated. It was down 0.3 percent as of 11:05 a.m.

African leaders attending this week's summit with China don't think that cooperation between the continent and Beijing has added to their debt burden, the Chinese government's top diplomat said on Thursday. Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged $60 billion (46 billion pounds) to African nations at Monday's opening of a China-Africa forum on cooperation, matching the size of funds offered at the last summit in Johannesburg in 2015, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

S&P Global Inc. is developing a custom credit-rating scale for China that will likely mean more triple-A’s, worrying investors about inflated grades, The Wall Street Journal reported. The credit-rating company, which is setting up an independent business in China, recently said it will tailor a system for rating bonds from businesses, local governments and other issuers there.

China has agreed to restructure some of Ethiopia’s debt, including a loan for a $4 billion railway linking its capital Addis Ababa with neighbouring Djibouti, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on Thursday. Abiy described the rescheduling as limited, but added that repayment of the railway debt has been extended by 20 years, Reuters reported. Landlocked Ethiopia and the Red Sea state inaugurated the railway in January, with 70 percent of the total cost covered through a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China (EXIM).

The new hot thing for Chinese savers is about as old and boring as it gets. Bank deposits, shunned for years by the nation’s return-hungry masses, are suddenly looking attractive again as higher-yielding investments prove riskier than many had anticipated, Bloomberg News reported. China’s household deposits rose in July at the fastest annual rate in a year -- an influx that analysts say may accelerate after the nation’s stock market sank at the quickest pace worldwide, hundreds of peer-to-peer lending platforms shuttered and companies defaulted on their debt at an unprecedented rate.

China is helping Africa develop, not pile up debt, a top Chinese official said on Tuesday, as the government pushes back against criticism it is loading the continent with an unsustainable burden during a major summit in Beijing. President Xi Jinping pledged $60 billion to African nations at Monday's opening of a China-Africa forum on cooperation, matching the size of funds offered at the last summit in Johannesburg in 2015, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Fines levied by China's banking regulator have surged since Guo Shuqing became its head in February 2017, rising nearly six-fold from the cumulative fines levied over the previous 14 years, UBS said in a report. The exponential increase in fines highlights a much stricter level of enforcement of regulations in the banking sector as Beijing seeks to fend off systematic financial risks, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.