Japanese 10-year bond yields had their biggest one-day jump in two years on Wednesday as traders wasted no time in testing the Bank of Japan’s resolve to loosen its target range for the debt benchmark, the Financial Times reported. The yield on the benchmark 10-year JGB jumped 6 basis points to 0.12 per cent, a day after the BoJ tweaked its vast quantitative easing programme. The central bank doubled the level it will permit 10-year yields to climb from 0.1 to 0.2 per cent.

South Korea's Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) has lost its preferred bidder status to buy Toshiba's NuGen nuclear project in Britain as Toshiba looks at other alternatives, the Japanese company said on Tuesday. The project in Moorside, northwest England, was expected to provide around 7 percent of Britain's electricity when built, but has faced setbacks after Toshiba's nuclear arm Westinghouse went bankrupt last year, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Japan has, more or less, constantly been in the midst of the most radical monetary policy experiment in modern history since 2012, a Bloomberg View reported. Is it working? It probably depends who you ask.

Delays to the planned sale of Toshiba's NuGen nuclear project in Britain have prompted a review of the roles of 60 direct employees, who are mainly based in Manchester, raising further doubts over its future, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The plant in Moorside, north-west England, was expected to provide around 7 percent of Britain's electricity when built, but has faced several setbacks after Toshiba's nuclear arm Westinghouse went bankrupt last year.

The maelstrom that hit global financial markets a decade ago is known in Japan as the Lehman Shock, after the bankruptcy of the American investment bank that caused it, The Economist reported. Japanese banks themselves escaped relatively unscathed, owing to defences built during the 1990s, when the country struggled with deflation and excessive debt. But they seem to have forgotten the lesson. Risk-taking is back. Squeezed at home by razor-thin margins and negative interest rates, both major and regional banks have been on a spree abroad.

Household spending in Japan shrank for a third month running in April, suggesting a sluggish end to spending in the first quarter of 2018 carried on into the second, the Financial Times reported. Spending fell 1.3 per cent year on year in April, sharpening from a fall of 0.7 per cent in March and defying expectations of a rebound, per a median estimate of 0.8 per cent growth from economists surveyed by Reuters.

Household spending in Japan shrank for the second straight month in March, adding to the case that private consumption may have contracted in the first quarter, the Financial Times reported. Spending fell 0.7 per cent year on year in the third month of 2018, with growth of 0.1 per cent in February revised to a fall of 0.9 per cent. The latest reading also ran counter to expectations, with a median estimate from economists polled by Reuters predicting a rise of 1.1 per cent.

It wasn’t so long ago that Suruga Bank Ltd. was seen as a model for how Japanese lenders can survive in an era of rock-bottom interest rates and weak loan demand. The regional bank was hailed for generating the best loan margins in the country, thanks to its focus on individual borrowers who were shunned by its risk-averse competitors. Now, Suruga has come unstuck for giving credit to investors in failed real estate investment projects, prompting Japan’s financial regulator to investigate the company’s lending practices, Bloomberg News reported.

Japanese equity funds posted their biggest net outflow since 2001 as investors regained their taste for risk assets in the past week and directed cash to emerging market equities and junk bonds, the Financial Times reported. The moves come as fears of a trade war eased and investors instead expressed optimism about strong earnings growth for US companies, which have begun reporting results for the first three months of the year.

Three bidders, including two new players, have submitted resolution plans after lenders called for fresh bids in Essar Steel Ltd.’s insolvency process, Bloomberg News reported. These include a joint venture between ArcelorMittal India and Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp, Nu Metal & Steel Pvt. Ltd, in which JSW Steel is an investor, and the Vedanta Group, according to two people in the know who spoke to BloombergQuint on the condition of anonymity. Of the three, ArcelorMittal-Suitomo JV had participated in the earlier bidding as well.