Chinese local governments are flooding the debt market with a new type of bond, lining up $200bn in issuance designed to fund infrastructure investment as Beijing seeks to stimulate a slowing economy, the Financial Times reported. China’s parliament in March approved a quota of Rmb1.35tn ($197bn) for issuance of “special-purpose” bonds for 2018, more than the combined quotas for the previous two years. But until recently, actual issuance was sluggish as local governments were under pressure to cut borrowing.

When Chinese businessman Yuan Yafei met British Prime Minister Theresa May in Shanghai this February, he vowed to keep pushing for further economic collaboration between China and the U.K., where his Sanpower Group owned the 169-year-old department-store chain, House of Fraser. But only six weeks later, Yuan’s group was pulling back from the U.K., beginning a months-long bid to sell the retailer that had been battered by online rivals, a weakening pound and mounting costs, Bloomberg News reported.

China’s HNA Group is in talks with banks to find a buyer for its CWT logistics firm just nine months after acquiring the Singaporean company in a $1 billion deal, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The sale, if completed, would be the latest in a series of divestments aimed at slashing debt at the aviation-to-financial services conglomerate that is restructuring its far-flung operations, Reuters reported.

More than 30 highly-leveraged Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have drawn up new plans to cut debt, the official China Securities Journal reported on Wednesday, part of a plan to cut debt ratios in the state sector by 2 percentage points by 2020, Reuters reported. China is in the middle of an ambitious corporate restructuring programme aimed at reducing debts and improving the performance of its huge but lumbering state-owned sector.

China’s ever-growing money market funds pose an increasing problem for the nation’s central bank as policy makers attempt to boost the flow of credit to cushion an economic slowdown, Bloomberg News reported. While the funds have offered savers a handy alternative to risky stocks and once high-flying wealth management products, they’re effectively raising borrowing costs.

China agreed to several small oil deals with Venezuela this week but gave no public confirmation that it would extend more loans to the cash-strapped country during a rare visit by President Nicolás Maduro to Beijing. Venezuela faces a stiff payments schedule over the next two months of about $2bn to bondholders, some of whom have debt secured against US-based refiner Citgo, and in compensation to western oil companies for past nationalisations in Venezuela.

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.

Chinese companies’ debt-servicing firepower has slumped to a three-year low even as authorities move to support their financing, showcasing the difficulty of getting stimulus through to the real economy, Bloomberg News reported. Listed nonfinancial companies had cash and equivalents to cover only 81 percent of debt due in the coming year, the worst since 2015 -- when China was battling hard-landing fears -- data compiled by Bloomberg show. Materials, utilities and energy sectors are particularly vulnerable as their cash levels were at about half of short-term obligations.

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.

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