Trading in shares of heavily indebted China Evergrande was suspended on Monday, days after some bondholders said the property developer at the center of jitters over China’s financial system had missed a second key bond interest payment. 

Shares of its unit Evergrande Property Services Group were also suspended, the Hong Kong stock exchange said. The bourse didn’t say why trading in the companies’ stock had been halted, and it was unclear who had initiated the suspension. 

Evergrande did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

With liabilities stretching into hundreds of billions of dollars, equal to 2% of China’s gross domestic product, Evergrande has sparked concerns its woes could spread through the financial system and reverberate around the world. Initial worries have eased somewhat after China’s central bank vowed to protect homebuyers’ interests. 

Monday’s share trading suspension sent a shiver through broader financial markets, which remain nervous about contagion, knocking the offshore yuan a little lower and weighing on the Hang Seng benchmark index and especially financials and other developers. Guangzhou R&F Properties Co Ltd fell 7%, Sunac China Holdings and Country Garden each fell 4%. 

Shares in Evergrande have plunged 80% so far this year, while its property services unit has dropped 43% as the group scrambles to raise funds to pay its many lenders and suppliers.   

Stock in its electric vehicle unit, China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group, fell as much as 8% early on Monday before paring losses. 

The cash-strapped group said on Sept. 30 that its wealth management unit had made a 10% repayment of wealth management products, which are largely owned by onshore retail investors, that were due by the same date. 

Once China’s top-selling property developer and now expected to be the subject of one of the largest-ever restructurings in the country, Evergrande has been prioritizing domestic creditors over offshore bondholders. 

The two offshore payments, which bondholders said failed to arrive by their due date, come as the company, which has nearly $20 billion in offshore debt, faces deadlines on dollar bond coupon payments totaling $162.38 million in the next month. 

Beijing is prodding government-owned firms and state-backed property developers to purchase some of Evergrande’s assets, sounding them out either directly or indirectly about asset purchases, people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters last Week. 

Meanwhile Chinese property group Hopson Development said in a statement on Monday it had suspended trading in its shares, pending an announcement related to a major acquisition by Hopson of a Hong Kong-listed firm and a possible mandatory offer. 

It was unclear whether the deal was related to Evergrande Group, and Hopson did not respond to a request for further comment. 

Shares of Hopson, which has a market value of $7.8 billion, have jumped 40% so far this year. 
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«Це не транзит, а реекспорт газу європейськими трейдерами»
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday he would not return to “uncontrolled immigration” to solve fuel, gas and Christmas food crises, suggesting such strains were part of a period of post-Brexit adjustment. 

At the start of his Conservative Party’s conference, Johnson was again forced to defend his government against complaints from those unable to get petrol for their cars, retailers warning of Christmas shortages, and gas companies struggling with a spike in wholesale prices. 

The British leader had wanted to use the conference to turn the page on more than 18 months of COVID-19 and to refocus on his 2019 election pledges to tackle regional inequality, crime and social care. 

Instead, the prime minister finds himself on the back foot nine months after Britain completed its exit from the European Union — a departure he said would give the country the freedom to better shape its economy. 

“The way forward for our country is not to just pull the big lever marked uncontrolled immigration, and allow in huge numbers of people to do work … So, what I won’t do is go back to the old, failed model of low wages, low skills supported by uncontrolled immigration,” he told BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. 

“When people voted for change in 2016 and … again in 2019 as they did, they voted for the end of a broken model of the UK economy that relied on low wages and low skill and chronic low productivity, and we are moving away from that.” 

It was the closest the prime minister has come to admitting that Britain’s exit from the EU had contributed to strains in supply chains and the labor force, stretching everything from fuel deliveries to potential shortages of turkeys for Christmas. 

“There will be a period of adjustment, but that is I think what we need to see,” he said. 

But he was clear he would not open the taps of immigration to fill such gaps, again shifting the responsibility to businesses to lift wages and attract more workers. 

Shortages of workers after Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic have sown disarray in some sectors of the economy, disrupting deliveries of fuel and medicines and leaving more than 100,000 pigs facing a cull due to a lack of abattoir workers. 

Conservative Party chair, Oliver Dowden, said that the government was taking measures to hire more truck drivers in general and that the government had started training military tanker personnel to start fuel deliveries on Monday. 

“We will make sure that people have their turkey for Christmas, and I know that for the Environment Secretary George Eustice this is absolutely top of his list,” he told Sky News. 

Rather than the reset Johnson hoped to preside over in the northern English city of Manchester, the conference looks set to be overshadowed by the supply-chain crises and criticism of the government’s withdrawal of a top-up to a state benefit for low-income households. 

Johnson may also come under fire for breaking with the Conservatives’ traditional stance as the party of low taxes after increasing them to help the health and social care sectors. 

“We don’t want to raise taxes, of course, but what we will not do is be irresponsible with the public finances,” he said. 

“If I can possibly avoid it, I do not want to raise taxes again, of course not.” 

 
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Life in the United States in 2021 seems more normal than the year before. The arrival of vaccines means the relaxing of rules for restaurant goers and sports enthusiasts. Even the impact of the delta variant is much less on the U.S. economy than in 2020 when shutdowns forced small businesses to close temporarily or permanently. Yet during the peak of the 2020 pandemic, a few people opened businesses, including these in California, and persevered through the odds.

Camera: Michelle Quinn, Roy Kim
Contributor: Mike O’Sullivan
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U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday he was going to “work like hell” to get both an infrastructure bill and a multi-trillion-dollar social spending bill passed through Congress and plans to travel more to bolster support with Americans.

Biden visited the Capitol on Friday to try to end a fight between moderates and left-leaning progressives in his Democratic Party that has threatened the two bills that make up the core of his domestic agenda.

The president on Saturday acknowledged criticism that he had not done more to gin up support for the bills by traveling around the country. He noted there were many reasons for that, including his focus on hurricane and storm damage during recent trips, among other things.

Biden said he would be going around the country “making the case why it’s so important” and making it clearer to people what is in the two bills.

He said he wanted with the bills to make life more livable for ordinary Americans by making child care affordable, for example.

“There’s nothing in any of these pieces of legislation that’s radical, that is unreasonable,” Biden said. “I’m going to try to sell what I think the people, the American people, will buy.”

Biden expressed confidence that both bills would get passed but declined to set a deadline, such as the November Thanksgiving holiday, for when that would happen.

“I believe I can get this done,” Biden said.

Moderate Democratic lawmakers wanted an immediate vote on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in the House of Representatives that has already passed the Senate, while progressives want to wait until there is agreement on a sweeping $3.5 trillion bill to bolster social spending and fight climate change.

Biden, a former senator who is deeply familiar with how the legislative process works, told his caucus on Friday that they could delay a vote on the smaller bill and sharply scale back the larger one to around $2 trillion.

Meanwhile the president said on Saturday he hoped Republicans would not use a filibuster in the Senate to block efforts to raise the debt ceiling.

“That would be totally unconscionable,” he said.

The Treasury Department estimates that it has until about Oct. 18 for the government’s $28.4 trillion borrowing limit to be raised by Congress or risk a debt default with potentially catastrophic economic consequences.
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Since China’s government declared all cryptocurrency transactions illegal last week and banned citizens from working for crypto-related companies, the price of bitcoin went up despite being shut out of one of its biggest markets.

Experts say large-scale Chinese miners of cryptocurrency — the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum — will take their high-powered, electricity-guzzling servers offshore. Exchanges of the digital money and the numerous Chinese startups linked to the trade also are expected to rebase offshore after dropping domestic customers from their rosters.

The shift highlights how virtual currencies can evade government regulation.

“The exchanges have been pushing offshore anyways, and with the exchange business you need cloud infrastructure, you need developers, you need management to move things in the right direction, and so whether that is sitting in Taipei, San Francisco, Singapore or Shanghai, it doesn’t really matter — those businesses are very virtual,” said Zennon Kapron, Singapore-based founder the financial consulting firm Kapronasia.

“The real impact we’ve probably seen though is in the miners, and most of those miners [are in] the process of shifting overseas or [have] already completed moving overseas,” he said.

Strongest anti-crypto action to date

On Sept. 24, the People’s Bank of China, Beijing’s monetary authority, released a statement saying cryptocurrencies lack the status of other monetary instruments. The notice, issued in tandem with nine other government agencies, including the Bureau of Public Security, declared all related business illegal and warned that cryptocurrency transactions originating outside China will also be treated as crimes.

Explaining the ban, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday that cryptocurrencies have disrupted the controlled economy’s financial systems and contributed to crimes such as money laundering.

Cryptocurrencies — digital commerce tools that aren’t linked to a centralized banking authority — first appeared in China around 2008. Chinese banks began to prohibit the use of digital currencies in 2013 and stepped up regulations after 2016.

China was the world’s biggest Bitcoin miner and supported the largest exchange by volume, according to the news website CryptoVantage. It says many of those who suddenly made millions when Bitcoin prices soared four years ago were in China.

Chinese miners and traders head to Singapore

The Chinese ban carries penalties for international exchanges that do business with people inside China, and news reports indicate international crypto exchanges are trying to cut ties with Chinese clients in recent days. But the companies themselves are largely staying quiet.

A spokesperson for digital currency exchange Coinbase said Wednesday it does not “have anything to share at this time” about the crackdown in China. U.S.-based Worldcoin Global, a new type of cryptocurrency, did not reply to a request for comment.

China’s growing pressure on crypto over the past few years had prompted stakeholders to leave the country, Kapron said, adding that less than a quarter of the country’s original cryptocurrency peer-to-peer lending startups — small firms that connect individual lenders and borrowers — remain in China.

Mining for digital currency — the process of using computers to enter bitcoins into circulation and verify cryptocurrency transactions in exchange for a payout — should get easier overseas as Chinese exit the market, Kapron said.

Smaller operators, he added, may be able to mine more easily without the competition of giant Chinese operations.

Singapore looms as a prime go-to place for operations that need not be physically onshore. The country had accepted about 300 cryptocurrency license applications as of July. From China, e-commerce giant Alibaba as well as digital financial firms Yillion Group and Hande Group have applied, news reports in Asia say.

Other Asian countries lack the legal welcome mat that Singapore has extended, said Jason Hsu, vice president of the Taiwan Fintech Association industry group.

“Where would that money flow to? I think it’s a question that needs to be answered,” Hsu said. “I think in Asia, Singapore would be a destination for them to go to. Singapore obviously has the clearest regulations and also wants to attract more digital fintech [financial-technology] companies.”

Outside Asia, Amsterdam and Frankfurt are “establishing their footprint as international centers” for financial technology, said Rajiv Biswas, Asia Pacific chief economist with market research firm IHS Markit. Financial technology covers cryptocurrency.

Western Europe ranked this year as the world’s biggest crypto economy in the world with inflows of more than $1 trillion or 25% of all global trade, activity, news and data service Chainalysis says. Europe’s surge follows similarly rapid growth in 2020.

Eventual resurgence for crypto in China?

Authorities in China are targeting crypto now as part of a wider “crackdown on overnight riches” and to “clean out the wild, wild West,” Hsu said, referring to largely unregulated market sectors. The trade will go underground for now, he forecasts, and China will eventually come out with an official digital currency issued through major banks.

Several countries are considering adopting new digital currencies that would allow people to exchange money without an intermediary, such as a bank. Proponents argue these currencies could capture the benefits of cryptocurrencies that make exchanging money easy, but without the price volatility of decentralized digital assets like bitcoin.

Chinese authorities may eventually swing to a more tolerant view of non-state-sanctioned digital currencies, though subject to strict criteria on what’s legal or otherwise, said Song Seng Wun, economist in the private banking unit of Malaysian bank CIMB. Blockchain, the core technology behind the public transaction ledger that makes crypto commerce transparent, could continue to develop in China for other ends, he added. 

 
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