Wildcat Boycott.

Self-boosting vaccines.

1. It started as an act of protest by fed-up apartment buyers in a single project in a city in central China. Now tens of thousands of people around the country are withholding payments on their mortgages for homes that developers, including China Evergrande Group, have yet to finish. The wildcat boycott on loans worth as much as 2 trillion yuan ($296 billion) threatens to deepen China’s real estate slump by shifting focus from the country’s embattled property companies to its massive banks. Lenders have relied on mortgages as their safest source of revenue as Covid lockdowns stifle growth. Policymakers are on alert. Financial regulators have urged banks to boost lending to builders to help finish the projects, and officials are even considering giving homeowners a grace period on payments, according to people familiar with the matter. One bank after another has assured investors that risks are controllable and their exposure to the delayed projects is small, even as a gauge of lenders’ stocks declined. Shares and bonds of China’s property companies have been dragged down as well, including those of some big players which have long been considered sheltered from sector’s woes. “If this trend is left unchecked and snowballs further, there is a risk that it could lead to a worsening of credit profiles for Chinese banks and chill the recent uptick in real estate sales,” says Chang Wei Liang, a macro strategist at DBS Bank. (Source: bloomberg.com)