China

China's central bank governor pledged on Thursday to guide more financial resources towards the private economy, suggesting refreshed urgency from Beijing to bolster the confidence among private firms as economic momentum weakens, Reuters reported. During a meeting on Thursday with at least eight private firms from sectors including property, aluminium and agribusiness, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Pan Gongsheng said the bank would roll out guidelines to support private firms.

China will lower financing costs for firms, stabilise market expectations and support the property sector in coming months, the central bank said on Tuesday amid a flagging economic recovery, Reuters reported. The world's No.2 economy staged a better-than-expected recovery in the first quarter following COVID reopening but has lost steam since the April-June quarter as demand waned both at home and abroad.

Some Chinese city governments have made it harder for developers to access tens of billions of dollars from property sales held in escrow accounts, raising risks the cash-strapped companies will be squeezed even more, Reuters reported. The moves are aimed at ensuring the completion of more unfinished projects at the city level, they said, at a time home sales are sliding and the future of the whole sector is uncertain.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, was supposed to leave China behind when the country made cryptocurrency trading illegal in 2021. Almost two years later, users traded $90 billion of cryptocurrency-related assets in China in a single month, according to internal figures viewed by The Wall Street Journal and current and former employees. The transactions made China Binance’s biggest market by far, accounting for 20% of volume worldwide, excluding trades made by a subset of very large traders.

One of China’s last major developers to have so far avoided defaults amid the nation’s property debt crisis slid in equity and credit markets Tuesday, after canceling a share placement, Bloomberg News reported. Shares of Country Garden Holdings Co., one of China’s largest private-sector developers, fell as much as 11% in their biggest drop this year, and ended down 7.6%. Its closely watched dollar bond due January next year, its nearest such maturity, dropped 2.3 cents Tuesday to 32.5 cents, a level that indicates high uncertainty on repayment.

Chinese ministries, regulators and the central bank on Tuesday pledged more financing support to small businesses, suggesting an urgency among policymakers to revive the private sector amid a flagging economic recovery, Reuters reported. China will encourage financial institutions to offer targeted and diversified financial support to some small and medium-sized enterprises in the manufacturing sector, according to a joint statement by the industry and finance ministries, financial and securities regulators and the central bank.

China's currency regulators are asking some commercial banks to reduce or postpone their purchases of U.S. dollars in order to slow the yuan's depreciation, Reuters reported. The informal instruction, or the so-called window guidance, is the latest in a series of steps taken by authorities this year to bolster a currency that has been hit by China's faltering post-pandemic economic recovery and rising yields for the U.S. dollar and other major currencies.

Signs of deflation are becoming more prevalent across China, heaping extra pressure on Beijing to reignite growth or risk falling into an economic trap it could find hard to escape, the Wall Street Journal reported. While the rest of the world tussles with inflation, China is at risk of experiencing a prolonged spell of falling prices that—if it takes root—could eat into corporate profits, sap consumer spending and push more people out of work. Its effects would ripple across the globe, easing prices for some products that countries like the U.S.

China’s 200-million-strong army of individual investors has turned away from the stock market, the Wall Street Journal reported. The country’s benchmark CSI 300 index lost around a fifth of its value last year, and has risen much less than major indexes in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere in 2023. That is creating a sense of despair among the office workers, civil servants and other ordinary citizens who are responsible for the bulk of trading in China’s stock market.

Growing pessimism about China’s housing market is dragging down the country’s largest surviving developer, which is again struggling to convince investors that it can weather the storm, the Wall Street Journal reported. At the start of this year, investors had regained confidence in Country Garden 2007 4.97%increase; green up pointing triangle, a 31-year-old property giant that benefited from a slew of measures that Chinese authorities rolled out in November to support the real-estate sector.