Xi Jinping leaves for Chennai for second informal summit with PM Modi

International News
Chinese President Xi Jinping left for India on Friday morning for the second informal meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
He will arrive at Tamil Nadu capital Chennai late afternoon.
Later in the evening, Xi will meet Modi and hold talks on a host of issues in a relaxed atmosphere at the historic tourist town of Mamallapuram.
After an overnight meeting, the two leaders are scheduled to meet again on Saturday to continue the discussions.The Chinese President is due to leave for Nepal on Saturday afternoon.
This is the second informal summit between Xi and Modi. Their first informal meeting at the Chinese city of Wuhan last year resulted in normalisation of the relations between the two countries after the 2017 Doklam standoff.
State-run Xinhua news agency reported that Xi left for Chennai this morning.
His entourage includes Ding Xuexiang, member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC), member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, and director of the General Office of the CPC, Yang Jiechi, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and He Lifeng, vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and head of the National Development and Reform Commission.

 Ahead of the summit, the state media said the Modi-Xi meeting would focus more on how to move beyond the past and present differences to forge a cooperative partnership....Read More

For Wall Street, China's financial markets are bigger than the trade war

International News
Executives from the biggest US financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase & Co and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, are meeting with top regulators in Beijing in a sign that the trade war with the US has done little to derail China’s opening of its $43 trillion financial system.
Among those scheduled to attend on Friday at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on the city’s Financial Street will be Yi Gang, governor of the People’s Bank of China and senior officials from the China Securities Regulatory Commission, according to the meeting’s agenda, which was seen by Bloomberg.
Even as the trade war rages, China has continued to open its financial sector at an unprecedented pace, luring global banks seeking to compete for an estimated $9 billion in annual profits. While the policy has often been cast as addressing U.S. complaints that the Asian nation has been a one-sided beneficiary of trade, domestic motivations are also behind the push, said Michael Pettis, professor of finance at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.
“China is very determined to reform its financial markets and knows that without the major American players, it is very hard to talk about having a truly internationalized market,” he said. “It also makes sense for China to accommodate a very important source of lobbying support, especially as there’s so little in the U.S. right now.”Representatives for JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declined to comment, while the PBOC and CSRC didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside of regular business hours.
Forcing Change

 Chinese regulators can’t ignore the country’s financial-market issues. Corporate bond defaults reached a record high last year and the nation’s banks are seeing their balance sheets swell with ever more bad loans....READ MORE