A group of Chinese investors is in talks with the bankruptcy estate of Icelandic bank Islandsbanki, which was previously known as Glitnir and failed in 2008, over buying a stake in the up-for-sale bank, a finance ministry source said on Thursday. The source told Reuters that among the investors were Chinese bank ICBC, insurer China Life Insurance Company and a large Chinese private equity fund. Creditors own 95 percent of Islandsbanki through ISB Holding while the government owns 5 percent.

China’s total debt load has climbed to more than two and a half times the size of its economy, underscoring the difficult challenge facing Beijing as it seeks to spur growth without sowing the seeds of a financial crisis, the Financial Times reported. The total debt-to-gross domestic product ratio in the world’s second-largest economy reached 251 per cent at the end of June, up from just 147 per cent at the end of 2008, according to a new estimate from Standard Chartered bank.

China's major banks have halted an experimental program, sanctioned by the country's central bank, that helped citizens transfer large sums overseas despite government capital controls, according to people with knowledge of the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported. The halt, which the people said was likely to be temporary, comes after the program was criticized by China's powerful state television broadcaster, underscoring the political sensitivity of the issue of wealthy Chinese moving money abroad.

Bank of China Ltd. denied a report by the state broadcaster alleging it broke the nation’s foreign-exchange rules by providing services that help clients move “dirty money” abroad, Bloomberg News reported. Reports by China Central Television and other media “contain discrepancies with and misunderstanding of the facts,” the Beijing-based lender said in a statement on its website late yesterday. “References to an ‘underground bank’ and ‘money laundering’ are inconsistent with the facts.” CCTV said Bank of China Ltd. was among lenders that circumvented the foreign-exchange regulations.

China should let more ailing firms go bankrupt to help improve economic mechanisms rather than allow them to get government-led bailouts, a deputy central bank governor said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The risk of corporate failures is rising as economic growth slows and the government tries to put a lid on high debt levels in the economy to help ward off financial risks. "In the course of our surveys, we found that many companies are in the zombie state but they have taken up a large amount of credit," Liu Shiyu told a forum in Beijing.

Chinese regulators increased banks’ capacity to lend money and bolster the slowing economy by changing the way loan-to-deposit ratios are devised, Bloomberg News reported. Banks from today can include in the calculation negotiable certificates of deposit sold to companies or individuals, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said in a statement yesterday. They can also exclude loans advanced to small enterprises and the rural sector that are backed by bonds, the CBRC said. Bank lending is capped at no more than 75 percent of deposits to prevent an overextension of credit.

In the latest sign of the mounting risks to China’s debt market, a bank for the first time ever reportedly disclosed the default on a loan by a local government financing vehicle, Fox Business News reported. Over the weekend, the 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese-language newspaper, reported Qilu Bank in Shandong Province told investors in its 2013 annual report that the Urban Construction and Comprehensive Development Company of Licheng District, Jinan City (located on China’s east coast) defaulted on a bank loan, according to Nomura.

China’s chief auditor discovered 94.4 billion yuan ($15.2 billion) of loans backed by falsified gold transactions, adding to signs of possible fraud in commodities financing deals, Bloomberg News reported. Twenty-five bullion processors in China, the biggest producer and consumer of gold, made a combined profit of more than 900 million yuan from the loans, according to a report on the National Audit Office’s website. Public security authorities are also probing alleged fraud at Qingdao Port, where copper and aluminum stockpiles may have been pledged multiple times as collateral for loans.

Distressed debt funds are raising cash to seek greater opportunities in China, where Standard & Poor’s says corporate borrowing topped the U.S. last year, Bloomberg News reported. Planned commitments to funds investing in Chinese and other Asian troubled assets are set to surpass $2 billion this year, up from $303 million in 2013, data from researcher Preqin Ltd. show. Morningside Group Holdings Ltd. in Hong Kong plans a $103 million vehicle, Preqin said. Guangzhou-based Shoreline Capital Management Ltd.

China has signalled it will resist calls for aggressive measures to prop up its flagging property market, even as house prices continue to drop, the Financial Times reported. People’s Daily, the Communist party’s main mouthpiece, said in a commentary on Monday that the property market was in a “normal adjustment period” and accused domestic developers, speculators and foreign banks of exaggerating the slowdown in order to put pressure on authorities to adopt heavy-handed stimulus policies.