China’s banking regulator, which has asked local lenders to provide loan information on the country’s top deal-making companies, is examining examples of acquisitions gone awry by those firms to assess potential risks to the financial sector, people familiar with the matter said.

China may finally be ready to cut the cord when it comes to the country’s troubled local government financing vehicles, Bloomberg News reported. Beijing’s deleveraging drive has seen rules impacting LGFV debt refinancing tightened, spurring a slump in issuance by the vehicles, which owe about 5.6 trillion yuan ($818 billion) to bondholders and are seen by some as the poster children for China’s post-financial crisis debt woes.

An outsized $6.6bn bond deal by Evergrande, the Chinese developer, risks raising borrowing costs in Asia’s booming bond markets, analysts have warned, following a rare first-day price fall that left buyers of the deal nursing losses of $250m, the Financial Times reported. Asian companies have tapped international markets at a record pace this year, raising $128bn in US dollar-denominated bonds — almost double the amount at this point last year, according to ANZ.

China’s leverage crackdown is forcing local companies to confront their addiction to short-term bond sales that they use to roll over debt, Bloomberg News reported. The shock therapy is worsening the outlook for corporate defaults in the second half of this year after borrowing costs jumped to a two-year high. With yields surging, Chinese non-banking firms sold 131 billion yuan ($19.3 billion) of bonds with a maturity of one year or less in May, the least since January 2014 and less than half of the same month last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Protests against Chinese property controls have grown in intensity in recent weeks, underscoring the challenge for the government in preventing public eruptions of anger as it cracks down on housing speculation, The Wall Street Journal reported. In response to skyrocketing home prices, governments in China’s big cities have set limits on the buying of multiple homes and higher down-payment ratios, which has left many unable to sell their homes and others worried they won’t be able to buy in before prices rise further.

China Huishan Dairy faces a bumpy road ahead in its effort to restructure its hefty debt, as a 2.5 billion yuan “discrepancy” in its cash position implies lingering obscurities over its financial well-being, the South China Morning Post reported. The Shenyang-based dairy farm operator said in a statement on Monday that it has found a discrepancy in its cash position based on “incomplete” management accounts and confirmation received from banks. It also said it was in talks with its creditors over a possible debt restructuring.

There’s been no shortage of bad news when it comes to China’s massive debt pile, from turbulence in the corporate bond market to last month’s sovereign rating downgrade by Moody’s Investors Service, Bloomberg News reported. But look beyond the negative headlines, and one encouraging fact stands out: China’s biggest companies are healthier than they’ve been in years. Thanks to a combination of economic stimulus and state-owned enterprise reform, debt-to-equity ratios at China’s largest non-financial firms have dropped to the lowest levels since 2010.

The bank regulator in a rust-belt Chinese province has urged regional lenders to roll over maturing loans to struggling coal and steel companies, a policy that cuts against the Communist party’s pledge to shut down “zombie” enterprises, the Financial Times reported. Investors widely assume that Chinese banks keep lossmaking companies on life support by rolling over maturing loans, often under pressure from local governments.

As recently as two years ago, owning shares in a bad bank charged with cleaning up nonperforming loans in China probably seemed like a good bet. Not so any more, at least for China Cinda Asset Management Co.The Beijing-based firm's costs are rising and soured-loan growth has leveled off, or in some cases, dropped at the banks Cinda purchases nonperforming advances from. Cinda's Hong Kong-listed stock is down 46 percent from its peak in January 2014 and is trading at a price-to-book ratio of 0.67 times, well below the one times at which it was listed at the end of 2013.

ChemChina has raised $20 billion (15.4 billion pounds) mainly in perpetual bonds to finance its purchase of Swiss seeds firm Syngenta, with Bank of China becoming the single largest investor providing half of that funding, according to a regulatory filing, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.