Japan’s banking regulator will seek to introduce penalties for manipulation of financial benchmarks, joining market watchdogs around the globe in pushing for broader authority and tougher supervision, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The Financial Services Agency should get formal authority to supervise organizations that set benchmarks such as the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate (Tibor) and to conduct investigations, an advisory committee to the regulator said in a statement on Tuesday. The FSA plans to submit a bill including the changes to parliament next year.

The president of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., one of Japan's biggest financial institutions, said his company has extended an unspecified number of "suspicious loans" to people with ties to organized crime, the latest in a series of firms to make such an admission since a scandal in September over a similar disclosure by a rival, Mizuho Bank Ltd., The Wall Street Journal reported.

The share of Japanese households with no financial assets rose to a record as falling incomes forced people to dig into their savings, highlighting the potential for widening disparities under Abenomics, Bloomberg reported. The proportion reached 31 percent, according to a Bank of Japan survey released in Tokyo yesterday, up from 26 percent a year earlier and the highest since the poll began in 1963. The BOJ surveyed 8,000 households of two or more people aged 20 years or older from June 14 though July 23.

Japanese restaurant chain Wagamama has gone into voluntary administration, and its Southbank venue in Melbourne has been shut down, The Age reported. Administrator KPMG took control of the business on Tuesday. Staff at the restaurant chain received news that the company behind Wagamama had gone into administration on Thursday and Friday. KPMG partner and administrator Ian Hall said the Southbank restaurant had been closed soon after the business was taken over. "The reason being was that it was not profitable," he said.

A move by the Bank of Tokyo to challenge the Solid Energy debt restructuring deal could backfire, leaving the bank being owed even more money, says Finance Minister Bill English, The New Zealand Herald reported. A debt restructuring process aimed at rescuing the struggling state-owned coal miner Solid Energy was announced on October 1. The Auckland branch of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ is recorded as the second-largest lender to Solid Energy and is opposing the proposed deal. Last week It lodged proceedings in the High Court in Auckland challenging the process.

Orient Corp., the Japanese consumer credit firm being probed for lending to crime groups with Mizuho Financial Group Inc., said it’s cooperating with police to prosecute gangsters who obtained loans fraudulently, Bloomberg reported. The company is in talks with lawyers to consider action against borrowers who signed 37 loan contracts by falsely declaring they have no mob ties, Orient said in a statement on its website yesterday. It is seeking to cancel the transactions.

Stimulus vs. debt reduction. That big question has tormented advanced economies in recent years, as they juggle attempts to lift sluggish growth with curbing unsustainable borrowing. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this week will try to have it both ways, The Wall Street Journal reported. Brushing off warnings that Japan's nascent economic recovery, stirred by his own package of bold stimulus policies, is still too delicate to withstand austerity measures, Mr.

Japan is on a roll. Its economy is growing at a robust 3.8 percent, the stock market is up by 40 percent this year, and the country is on the cusp of overcoming 15 years of deflation. Adding to the positive trend, Tokyo just won its bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, raising hopes of an investment and construction boom, the International Herald Tribune reported. What could possibly go wrong? A plan to raise taxes at the worst conceivable moment, economists warned. “It’s nonsense.

Japan is considering a reduction in corporate income taxes as part of a stimulus package to cushion the economy from the planned increase in the sales levy, according to three people briefed on the matter, Bloomberg reported. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has instructed officials to discuss a cut in the tax on company profits as he weighs whether to proceed with an increase in the consumption levy in April, according to the people, who asked not to be named as the discussions aren’t public.

Don't expect the Bank of Japan to come to the rescue if the sales-tax tussle triggers financial-market turmoil, people familiar with the bank's thinking say, The Wall Street Journal reported. Debate over the plan to double the sales tax in two stages starting in April has heated up over the past six weeks. Some advisers to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have called for him to postpone or moderate the increase, arguing that a higher tax burden would damp consumer spending and threaten economic recovery.