China

China is weighing how to consolidate financial regulation, following missteps that exacerbated market turmoil and embarrassed Beijing. One option under consideration would empower the central bank, as other countries have done in times of risk, The Wall Street Journal reported. The government has a number of tools for reining in its often freewheeling markets and managing its economy, and it hasn’t shied from using them. But its credibility has been hurt by violent swings in the stock market and unexpected devaluations of the currency over the past year.

The home to about 3 million people in the northeast rust-belt province of Liaoning is ground zero in China’s slowdown -- the worst-performing city in the worst-performing province, Bloomberg News reported.. Ads offering work visas abroad are peppered across hoardings, and billboards offer loans for people in "urgent need." Shuttered car-parts factories flank the highway to the high-speed train station. In the center, a closed wedding-photograph studio has a notice in the window that reads: "Owner is going overseas.

Soft Chinese inflation and G20 concerns that the global recovery remains grim are hardening views among some economists that more government stimulus will be needed to support China, the world's second-biggest economy, the Irish Times reported. Consumer inflation last month remained under the official target of around 3 percent for this year, data released on Sunday showed, indicating persistently weak domestic demand. The consumer price index (CPI) rose 1.9 percent in June from a year earlier, compared with a 2.0 percent increase in May, China's National Bureau of Statistics said.

The Chinese government's call to the nation to build an innovation-driven economy from the top down has sparked a rush by local governments to construct new buildings in the name of supporting creativity, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Innovation centres have been popping up around the country and are set to more than double to nearly 5,000 in the next five years, according to internet research firm iiMedia. The only problem for local governments; entrepreneurs are not moving in.

Some $1.3tn in Chinese corporate loans — equivalent to the size of the entire Australian economy — is “at risk” of turning bad, according to the International Monetary Fund. But you would never guess that anything was even slightly amiss in corporate China if you were to consult the country’s homegrown credit rating agencies, the Financial Times reported. Everything is just fine, say the top-10 Chinese credit rating agencies.

China's Baosteel Group and Wuhan Iron and Steel Group, two of the country's largest steelmakers, are together planning to restructure, their listed units said in separate stock exchange filings on Sunday, Reuters reported. Baosteel Group is China's second-largest steelmaker, and Wuhan Iron and Steel Group is the country's fourth-largest. The companies did not specify what the restructuring would entail. Beijing has said that mergers would be a key way to consolidate the steel sector, aiming to cut overcapacity and increase the proportion of output from China's ten biggest mills.

In the imprecise science of divining China’s banking health, the fine print is sometimes worth a closer look than the final statistic. This week, the McKinsey Global Institute published a new estimate of China’s nonperforming loan ratio, measuring it at 7% as of last year. The indicator shows bad debt as a percentage of the total loan book, and is the most basic brush stroke in an analysis of China’s economic state. McKinsey ventured that this portion could rise to 15% in 2019 if China fails to change its investment-heavy approach to economic development.

Chinese officials hit back at critics of the country’s mounting debt pile on Thursday, saying the country’s banks had taken measures to ensure non-performing loans would not pose a systemic risk to China’s financial system, the Financial Times reported. “China’s banking sector is generally stable and risks are under control,” Wang Shengbang, a senior official with the country’s banking regulator, said at a briefing.

China is renegotiating billions of dollars of loans to Venezuela and has met with the country’s political opposition, marking a shift in its approach to a nation it once viewed as a US counterweight in the Americas. Venezuela is facing one of the worst crises of its 200-year history, with a collapsing economy and political deadlock stoked by the oil price slump. China, which is Caracas’s biggest creditor and has loaned the country $65bn since 2005, has already extended the repayment schedules for debts backed by oil sales.

Whether crisis-ridden Venezuela will default is a question increasingly on the minds of bond traders. It’s now also one that is getting front-page treatment from China, one of the Latin American country’s biggest financial backers, Bloomberg News reported. On June 11, the People’s Daily -- the mouthpiece paper of China’s Communist Party -- published an article in its overseas edition with the headline “Will Venezuela Default?” After considering its willingness and ability to pay, the author concludes the answer is no and chalks up all the talk about default to media speculation.