China’s riskiest corporate bonds are looking disproportionately expensive, a worrying sign that investors may have underestimated their risk as a tighter monetary policy and painful industrial restructuring weaken companies’ ability to repay debt, the International New York Times reported.

President Xi Jinping gathered with his economic mandarins in December for their annual strategy meeting at a heavily guarded government hotel. In closed-door sessions, say people familiar with the confab, he made clear what their mandate was for 2017: He would tolerate no wobbliness in the economy. The communiqué coming out of the session singled out one policy objective in particular—keep the yuan stable.

China’s anti-corruption investigators are targeting the country’s top insurance regulator, throwing doubt over an industry that has been behind a wave of blockbuster global deals but has raised concerns about financial risk in the world’s second-largest economy, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.

The first ever downgrade of a Chinese local-government financing vehicle by an international ratings agency is reigniting concern over the debt-saddled entities, amid angst there could be more cuts to come, Bloomberg News reported. S&P Global Ratings reduced its credit rating on Jiangsu NewHeadline Development Group, a construction services provider and one of the largest financing firms owned by Lianyungang City -- in China’s eastern Jiangsu province -- by one notch to BB Thursday.

China’s so-called bad banks are thriving as alternative lenders, evolving from bad-debt managers into some of the country’s largest financial conglomerates just as margins at the big state-owned banks come under pressure, the Financial Times reported. China’s four centrally controlled asset management companies (AMCs) were set up in 1999 to swallow toxic assets from banks, and have had their assets grow expansively over the past five years.

China’s deleveraging push has racked up the most defaults on corporate bonds ever for a first quarter, and the identity of the debtors is pretty revealing. Seven companies have defaulted on a total of nine bonds onshore so far in 2017, versus 29 for all of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In a sign of the struggles facing China’s old economic model, most of them depend on heavy industry and construction.

China's State Power Investment Corp said Westinghouse's bankruptcy filing would not have a "substantial impact" on the country's nuclear plans and the two sides would ensure a key AP1000 reactor project would be completed on schedule this year, Reuters reported. The project is the world's first Westinghouse-designed AP1000 reactor project, being built at Sanmen on China's eastern coast, and is one of four reactors planned with State Power.

China’s economy held steady in the first quarter, though the momentum, fueled by government-directed spending and low-cost funding, may be tough to sustain, according to a private quarterly survey, The Wall Street Journal reported. The stimulus-fueled engines that powered the Chinese economy in the second half of last year and early this year, including real estate and commodities, are increasingly wobbly and are adding to already high debt-levels, China Beige Book International said in its latest survey.

A new specter is haunting China’s financial system: the negotiable certificate of deposit. An explosion in banks’ use of the bondlike loans, whose durations range from a month to a year, is testing Beijing’s resolve to cure the economy of its addiction to debt-fueled growth and investment booms, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The founder and a former executive of China Medical Technologies Inc. were charged in the U.S. with stealing more than $400 million from investors in the bankrupt maker of medical diagnostic tests as part of a seven-year scheme, Bloomberg News reported.