Headlines

Pan Gongsheng was named China’s central bank governor Tuesday in the widely anticipated final major appointment of the ruling Communist Party’s once-a-decade change of power, the Associated Press reported. Pan, a deputy central bank governor and veteran of China’s state-owned banking industry, succeeds Yi Gang, an American-trained economist who held the post for five years. The endorsement of Pan's promotion by the ceremonial legislature, the National People’s Congress, follows other Cabinet-level appointments announced in March.

Governments and companies around the world spent decades loading up on trillions of dollars of debt whose interest costs rise and fall alongside inflation. But what served as cheap funding when prices were stagnant has rapidly become more expensive, the Wall Street Journal reported. The inflation-linked headache echoes the broader challenges arising at the end of more than a decade of global easy money, in which debtors borrowed vast amounts at very low, and sometimes negative, interest rates. Investors are on alert for financial vulnerabilities after a crisis in U.S.