It turned a few heads Tuesday when an analyst at Fitch was quoted saying that China has a 60% probability of experiencing a banking crisis by 2013, the China Real Time Report blog reported. The analyst, Richard Fox, a London-based senior director at Fitch, told Bloomberg News that Fitch sees risks of “holes in bank balance sheets” should a property bubble burst. The jarring assessment was based on the Macro-Prudential Risk Monitor, a sort of analytical tripwire system that Fitch developed in 2005 to flag potential bank crises.

New Chinese government figures show its national debt load remains low compared with other major economies. But including the debts of local governments and many parts of the state-owned banking sector, as many economists say is proper, shows the constraints facing Beijing in the fight against inflation, its top economic priority, The Wall Street Journal reported. In a report issued during the annual session of the National People's Congress, China's legislature, the Ministry of Finance said central government debt at the end of 2010 was $1.03 trillion.

The chief executive of property developer CapitaLand Ltd.'s China unit said Tuesday that the country's latest measures to cool the property sector, including restrictions on home purchases and reduced land supply for private development, will most likely result in pent-up demand rather than lowering prices, The Wall Street Journal reported. Beijing is concerned about overheating in the real-estate market after months of rising home prices prompted widespread resentment over unaffordable housing.

Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom won the rights to a giant Siberian gas field destined to supply the fast-growing markets of China, a spokesman for the sale organiser said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Victory at the auction will allow Gazprom to extract the field's 2 trillion cubic metres of reserves, enough to supply the world for eight months, and forge deeper ties with China, where the Russian energy giant plans to start exporting gas in 2015.

Rosneft is set to take on Gazprom when Russia puts the Kovykta gas field on the block on Tuesday as the country's top crude producer aims to muscle in on the gas export monopoly's plans to supply China. Gazprom and state holding firm Rosneftegaz have been allowed to bid for the right to develop the Kovykta field, which is located near Lake Baikal and has reserves of 2 trillion cubic metres. That's enough to meet world demand for eight months.

China has required some small- and medium-sized banks to deposit more reserves at the central bank to rein in inflation and aggressive loan growth, the state-run China Securities Journal reported today, citing unnamed sources. The report said the punitive increase in banks' reserve requirement ratio, which took effect earlier this week, was mainly targeted at China's regional banks. But the report didn't name any banks. Though China has yet to announce an official lending target for this year, it has used various monetary tools to tame credit growth and inflation.

Now that it has passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, China is considering the next step as a world power: making its money a global currency, the International Herald Tribune reported. No one expects that to happen immediately. And even the Chinese government is wary of making some of the free-market moves that would enable the renminbi to take its place alongside the dollar, euro and Japanese yen as a fully convertible reserve currency. Still, over the last year Beijing has begun to gradually loosen its tight currency controls.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, on a visit Monday to Latin America's biggest economy, urged Brazilian officials to help the U.S. pressure China to allow its currency to appreciate, The Wall Street Journal reported. Though officials in public shied away from specifics of any plan to coordinate calls for a stronger yuan, a person familiar with the discussions said Brazil and the U.S. may speak with a common voice on the issue in a coming meeting of the Group of 20 major economies.

China said Thursday that for the first time it would allow some cities to impose a property tax on homeowners in the hope of curbing speculation in the housing market and also reducing the government’s reliance on land auctions for income, the International Herald Tribune reported. China’s State Council, or cabinet, announced the decision a day after releasing a broader set of measures aimed at taming housing prices and preventing a property bubble from threatening the nation’s fast-growing economy.

China went from scooping up the most Japanese debt in a year to selling the most, exiting the world’s lowest yields as forecasters expect the yen to retreat further from the 15-year high seen in November, Bloomberg reported. The country sold a net 81.3 billion yen ($979 million) of Japanese bonds in November, Japan’s Ministry of Finance said yesterday. China had been set for the biggest yearly increase since at least 2005 before unwinding with net sales in three of the four months through November.