China’s residential property sales rose in October, the first on-year increase of 2024, as the government’s latest stimulus blitz brought back buyers, Bloomberg News reported. The value of new-home sales from the 100 biggest real estate companies rose 7.1% from a year earlier to 435.5 billion yuan ($61.2 billion), reversing from a 37.7% slump in September, according to preliminary data from China Real Estate Information Corp. Sales surged 73% from a month earlier.

In January, the Catalan regional government in Spain created a specialized desk dedicated to increasing investment and trade with China, the world’s second-largest economy. In July, the Port of Barcelona approved plans to build a terminal with direct access to the port’s railway for electric vehicles that China is exporting to Europe, the New York Times reported. Last month, during a visit to Beijing by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the Chinese wind turbine giant Envision Energy agreed to team up with his government and invest $1 billion to build a green hydrogen industrial park.

China is considering approving next week the issuance of over 10 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) in extra debt in the next few years to revive its fragile economy, Reuters reported. China's top legislative body, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), is looking to approve the fresh fiscal package, including 6 trillion yuan which would partly be raised via special sovereign bonds, on the last day of a meeting to be held from Nov. 4-8.

China's central bank launched a new lending tool on Monday to inject more liquidity into the market and support credit flow in the banking system ahead of the expiration of trillions of yuan in loans at the end of the year, Reuters reported. The People's Bank of China said in a statement it had activated the open market outright reverse repo operations facility to "maintain a reasonable abundance of liquidity in the banking system and further enrich the central bank's policy toolbox".

As recently as 2010, few industries were as lawless, and yet as central to the global economy, as China’s production of rare earth metals, the New York Times reported. Consignments of rare earths frequently changed hands for sacks of Chinese currency: The rule of thumb was that a cubic foot of tightly packed 100-renminbi bills was worth $350,000. At a warehouse in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, acid was used illegally to extract rare earths, and the residue, faintly radioactive, was dumped into the municipal sewage.

China’s central bank kept a key policy rate steady in October, a widely expected move after officials made a flurry of rate cuts last month to support the ailing economy, the Wall Street Journal reported. The People’s Bank of China on Friday injected 700 billion yuan of liquidity into the country’s banking system via its one-year medium-term lending facility at an unchanged rate of 2.0%. That compared with a total of 789 billion yuan of MLF loans due this month, marking a net cash withdrawal of 89 billion yuan.

China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle said on Friday that its potential sellers have decided to cease talks for a stake sale in the company, which is the electric vehicle unit of the debt-laden China Evergrande, Reuters reported. In May, liquidators of the parent company - which held 58.5% in the EV unit - said they were talking to a third-party buyer to sell a 29% stake in the EV group, with an option to sell the rest of the holding within a certain period of time.

Pakistan is getting a promising response from China over its request to lengthen maturities for Belt and Road Initiative loans, according to its finance minister, signaling potentially more breathing room for the nation that has been squeezed by costly borrowing in the past, Bloomberg News reported. The South Asian nation is looking to increase the maturities for debt taken to build power plants and “create enough space” to lower electricity prices, Muhammad Aurangzeb said in an interview in Washington.

China’s youth unemployment rate dropped in September after hitting a seasonal high during the summer but remained elevated, underscoring the strains in the country’s job market, the Wall Street Journal reported. The jobless rate among 16- to 24-year-olds, excluding students, stood at 17.6% last month, down from the peak of 18.8% in August, when millions of college graduates entered the labor market, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed on Tuesday.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen rebuked China’s “opaque” lending practices and urged global financial institutions and other creditors to accelerate debt relief to low- and middle-income countries in an interview on Monday, the New York Times reported. Her comments came ahead of this week’s annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, where global economic policymakers are gathering in Washington at a pivotal moment for the world economy. Inflation has eased, but war in the Middle East has threatened to jolt energy markets.