Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world’s largest lender by assets, reported its strongest quarterly profit growth in two years as soured credit and lending margins stabilized amid an uptick in the economy, Bloomberg News reported. Net income rose 1.4 percent to 75.79 billion yuan ($11 billion) in the three months ended March 31 from 74.76 billion yuan a year earlier, the Beijing-based lender said in an exchange filing on Friday. Rival lender Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. separately reported a 1.9 percent profit increase for the period.

Investors are becoming more discerning when it comes to the origin of Chinese debt, Bloomberg News reported. China saw its worst start to a year on record for corporate defaults, with companies headquartered in two eastern provinces -- Liaoning and Shandong -- responsible for the lion’s share. Money managers are taking notice, with a run of messy, high-profile company scandals helping sour sentiment toward certain regions. Beijing’s de-leveraging drive, which has been ramped up this month and has boosted borrowing costs, is also a factor.

Executives at Kaisa Group Holdings, the first Chinese property developer to default on an overseas bond, have had a busy few weeks, the Financial Times reported. Since trading of the company’s Hong Kong-listed shares resumed on March 27 after a two-year suspension, they have belatedly issued Kaisa’s 2014 and 2015 annual reports, interim reports for 2015 and 2016, and unaudited operating figures for the first quarter of 2017. Adding to the sense that it is finally business as usual at Kaisa, the company’s shares surged 85 per cent on their first day of trading.

China's debt-stricken Chongqing Iron and Steel Company warned of the risk of bankruptcy on Tuesday, after one of its creditors submitted an application to a local court to reorganise its assets, Reuters reported. Chongqing Steel said in a notice posted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that the creditor, identified as Chongqing Laiquyuan Trading, told a court on Monday that the southwest China-based steelmaker's assets were not sufficient to pay off all its debts.

Rising defaults in China are unearthing hidden debt at companies across the country, Bloomberg News reported. Small firms that can’t get loans by themselves have been winning banks over by getting other companies to guarantee their borrowings. The companies making those pledges exclude them from their balance sheets, leaving creditors in the dark. Borrowers often extend the guarantees for each other, raising the risk that failures could ricochet, at a time when increasing borrowing costs have already added to strains.

Former Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said China should allow smaller local governments to default on debt because it would signal that central government bailouts aren’t assured, Bloomberg News reported. Such defaults would educate investors that their investments will be allowed to go bad, Lou said Friday at a public finance forum in Beijing. "They need to shoulder responsibility," said Lou, who’s now chairman of the country’s social security fund.

China is engaged in a charm offensive to lure foreign money into its bond market, which has grown in a short period of time from a minnow to the third largest in the world, after the US and Japan, the Financial Times reported. The opening of the bond market to foreigners is part of a transformation in the international financial system, which is slowly linking up with a Chinese economy that was once walled off behind tight capital controls. It is a crucial step in Beijing’s plan to turn the renminbi into one of the anchor currencies of the global economy.

China’s shadow banking is back in full swing, an unintended side effect of the government’s campaign against financial leverage, which has curbed traditional lending and squeezed bond financing. Data from the central bank Friday showed that off-balance sheet lending surged 754 billion yuan ($109 billion) in March, taking the first quarter’s total increase to a record 2.05 trillion yuan, Bloomberg News reported.

China's new chief banking regulator has started with a bang, issuing a flurry of new policy directives during his first month aimed at the industry's knottiest problems, in line with the government’s focus this year on managing financial risk, the Financial Times reported. The China Banking Regulatory Commission has issued seven policy documents in the past 12 days, in what state news agency Xinhua is calling a “regulatory windstorm”.

Predicting the evolution of corporate debt cycles is always tricky. In China it’s doubly hard—because there are two cycles in process. Most concern about the speedy rise of credit across China’s economy is focused on the sheer scale of corporate leverage, now close to 166% of GDP, The Wall Street Journal reported. Less noticed is that parallel debt cycles in the public and private sector are running at different speeds.