China is zooming to a record year of corporate-bond defaults, with the 2018 total already more than three-quarters of the previous high even before an expected economic slowdown bites, Bloomberg News reported. Chinese companies have reneged on about 16.5 billion yuan ($2.5 billion) of public bond payments so far this year, compared with the high of 20.7 billion yuan seen in all of 2016, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Strains are set to get worse if the trends of credit-rating companies are anything to go by -- agencies including Dagong Global Rating Co.

Global worries over trade wars, central bank rate hikes and geopolitical instability have hammered emerging-market debt in recent months. The fact is, over the past decade, many developing and low-income countries have simply borrowed too much, a Bloomberg View reported. They borrowed from the markets, from banks and from other countries. In particular, they borrowed from China, which has averaged more than $100 billion in annual financing commitments since 2010. Those bills are now coming due.

China’s manufacturing growth inched lower in June, according to an independent gauge, the Financial Times reported. The Caixin-Markit China manufacturing purchasing managers’ index came in at 51 last month, still above the 50-point mark delineating growth from contraction but down 0.1 points from May’s level. The gauge, which concentrates on smaller and private companies, stood a half a point below its official counterpart, which is focused on larger and state-owned manufacturers and dropped 0.4 points in June.

A Chinese company in a remote area near Tibet has had a dizzying month in the credit market, underscoring broader concerns about debt loads at local borrowers, Bloomberg News reported. Notes from Qinghai Provincial Investment Group Co. due later this year surged by a record on Wednesday after Bloomberg News reported that the firm plans to repay the securities. The bonds had tumbled to record lows just last week after S&P Global Ratings said the company’s short-term debt totals more than six times cash and that it lacks a plan to refinance the notes.

China’s top economic planning body has told the country’s heavily indebted property companies to curb their issuance of dollar-denominated bonds, a sign of Beijing’s concern about the side effects of the yuan’s recent slide, The Wall Street Journal reported. In a statement late Wednesday, the National Development and Reform Commission said it would ban property companies from selling bonds outside China, unless the proceeds were used to repay maturing debt or to prevent defaults.

A leaked report from a Chinese government-backed think tank has warned of a potential “financial panic” in the world’s second-largest economy, a sign that some members of the nation’s policy elite are growing concerned as market turbulence and trade tensions increase, Bloomberg News reported. Bond defaults, liquidity shortages and the recent plunge in financial markets pose particular dangers at a time of rising U.S.

China’s domestic bonds, denominated in renminbi, have been popular with international investors this year, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. But changes in key market conditions — including an upsurge in corporate defaults and the renminbi’s slide against the US dollar — raises questions over the sustainability of inflows.

A deepening sense of unease is rippling through China’s financial markets. The benchmark Shanghai stock index has tumbled 20 percent in just five months to enter a bear market, Bloomberg News reported. The yuan is heading for its longest losing streak in four years in Hong Kong. Corporate defaults are mounting. There are homegrown reasons for the concern: the nation’s deleveraging campaign is reducing the amount of liquidity available -- threatening growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

Chinese regulators have freed up an extra $100 billion for bank lending in a move financial analysts said could help to reassure investors amid trade tensions with Washington, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. The reduction on Sunday in reserves banks are required to hold was part of a series of such cuts economists had forecast before the dispute with President Donald Trump erupted. But they said the announcement could help to defuse fears a threatened U.S. tariff hike might dampen Chinese economic growth.

Three years after a wave of forced selling by margin traders fueled a collapse in China’s stock market, a new breed of leveraged shareholders is threatening to trigger another downward spiral, Bloomberg News reported. More than 5 trillion yuan ($770 billion) of Chinese shares, or about 12 percent of the country’s market capitalization, have been pledged as collateral for loans, according to data compiled by China Securities Co. and Bloomberg.