VENTURE CAPITAL POST

China's factories suffered their fastest drop in activity in a year in April as new orders shrank, a private business survey showed on Monday, hardening the case for fresh stimulus measures to halt a slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.

The current level of China's yuan CNY=CFXS is appropriate because it reflects foreign exchange supply and demand and economic fundamentals, a top central bank researcher said on Saturday, playing down talk of suspected official intervention.

China's long-awaited international payment system to process cross-border yuan transactions is ready, and may be launched as early as September or October, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

China's factory sector unexpectedly shrank for the first time in nearly 2-1/2 years in January and firms see more gloom ahead, an official survey showed, raising expectations that policymakers will take more action to forestall a sharper slowdown.

A landmark legal opinion this week will remind the European Central Bank of the limits it faces as it advances towards money printing, while a tumbling oil price saps inflation in debt-strained Europe.

The People's Bank of China will continue to maintain "prudent" monetary policy in 2015, keeping credit growth stable while having its hands free to fine-tune policy when necessary, the regulator said in an online statement on Friday.

Oil prices rose on Monday, after dropping for the past two sessions, as escalating clashes in Libya stoked worries about supply from the OPEC member.

China's latest interest rate cut is set to dent the profitability of domestic lenders, especially mid-sized banks, which are already suffering from higher bad loans and a slowdown in profit growth.

South Korea and China agreed to extend an existing swap agreement worth 64 trillion Korean won or 360 billion yuan by three more years, the Bank of Korea said in a statement on Saturday.

The chance of a hard landing for China's economy is very small in spite of worries about the country's real-estate sector, the chief economist of the People's Bank of China said on Saturday.

The euro zone's struggle to avoid another recession will take center stage in the coming week in the absence of major U.S. data, as investors mull whether the ECB's new asset-buying plan is a prelude to even more radical steps.

Factory activity in Europe and Asia cooled in August after a strong July, as new orders dwindled in the face of escalating tensions in Ukraine and a patchy recovery in China, purchasing managers indexes showed.

BTC China, the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world, has begun allowing users to buy the digital currency using Chinese yuan again, just a month after it halted renmibi deposits because of a bank warning.

Tightening monetary policy in China has been reduced due to the slowing yearly consumer inflation rate of 3% in November from 3.2% the month before, said a Reuters report.

The People's Bank of China had undertaken a program of lowering money supply to avoid further inflation, but this may lead to lack of financial support