China

China’s banks are set to be the biggest losers in the sweeping bailouts of the country’s steel and coal industries, the Financial Times reported. Local governments hoping to save their steel mills and coal miners have announced a series of restructuring plans, enlisting the banks to take the hit by improving the terms of the loans or swapping them for bonds or equity in the struggling groups.

As bond defaults soar in China, investors and regulators are moving to introduce financial tools that have been widely used in global markets to provide protection for creditors in cases where companies can’t pay their debts, The South China Morning Post reported. The National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors (NAFMII), a Chinese industry body under the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), has consulted major banks and brokerage firms in recent weeks about a plan to introduce credit default swaps, according to recent media reports in the mainland and Hong Kong.

China’s debt pile is huge and – more worryingly – growing fast. And credit isn’t delivering the same kind of economic boost it once did. But most debt is in local hands in a largely closed financial system, giving China’s leaders some breathing space to fix the mess. And that’s good for the global economy, Bloomberg News reported. China’s total debt is now about two and a half times the size of its economy. It takes almost a third of gross domestic product just to service it. Corporations are by far the biggest debtors, especially state-owned enterprises.

The best-performing bank in China is in a struggling city in the northeast where weeds sprout alongside the concrete skeletons of high rises in an industrial zone that mostly looks like a ghost town, Bloomberg News reported. Steel plants have laid off tens of thousands of workers. Cranes stand idle on construction sites. Wipe away a spiderweb on a dirty glass door at an empty complex with smashed windows and there’s a notice from the local government demanding rent unpaid since November 2014. Yet the Bank of Tangshan’s financial statements hardly reflect these realities.

Cracks are starting to show in China’s labor market as struggling industrial firms leave millions of workers in flux, Bloomberg News reported. While official jobless numbers haven’t budged, the underemployment rate has jumped to more than 5 percent from near zero in 2010, according to Bai Peiwei, an economics professor at Xiamen University. Bai estimates the rate may be 10 percent in industries with excess capacity, such as unprofitable steel mills and coal mines that have slashed pay, reduced shifts and required unpaid leave.

If a country’s fiscal deficit hit 10% of GDP five years running, you might reasonably conclude that its public finances were parlous, The Economist reported. So it is understandable that China has bristled at suggestions that it is veering into such territory. Officially, China is a paragon of fiscal rectitude: its annual deficits have averaged just 1.8% in the past half-decade. But the IMF, Goldman Sachs and others have come up with “augmented” estimates of nearer to a tenth of GDP, more than five times the official number.

China home prices rose 0.8 percent in July nationwide, but stalled or fell in more cities than in June, adding to concerns that one of the economy's key growth drivers is losing steam but offering some relief for policymakers worried about property bubbles, Reuters reported. A robust recovery in home prices and sales gave a stronger-than-expected boost to the world's second-largest economy in the first half of the year, helping to offset stubbornly weak exports.

Chinese government bonds are headed for a fourth weekly advance, with the benchmark 10-year yield dropping to a seven-year low, on concern the nation’s economy is slowing and as corporate failures increase. The 20 and 30-year sovereign yields declined to 3.10 per cent and 3.25 per cent, respectively, the lowest for both since Bloomberg started compiling the data in 2006. Chinese sovereign bonds have benefited from overseas inflows, with foreign investors boosting their holdings of onshore debt by the most in two years in June, after the nation eased access to domestic markets.

China needs to reduce its reliance on credit-fueled investment, and deal with rising corporate debt and other imbalances while those problems are still manageable, the International Monetary Fund urged Friday in its annual review of the world’s second-largest economy, The Wall Street Journal reported.

New economic data for China broken down by region shines a light on how uneven growth is around the country and how the nation’s statistics are still suspect, The Wall Street Journal reported. The figures that have trickled out in recent days, measuring gross domestic product in the first half of 2016 by individual province, have revived old questions over China’s statistical methodology.