Two departments said borrowers of existing floating-rate personal housing loans may, if their loan rate diverges from the nationwide rate on newly issued personal housing loans by a specified threshold, negotiate with banking institutions to change the contract rate or apply to replace the outstanding loan with a newly issued floating-rate personal housing loan; the borrower will choose the method.

At a routine briefing on Aug. 27 the Ministry of Natural Resources released China’s first national geometric reference imagery dataset. The dataset, produced jointly with provincial natural-resources departments, is a national-level imagery baseline covering all land and designated as a public geospatial product to support Digital China and the surveying and mapping sector’s upgrade. Two market-relevant features: nationwide spatial resolution reaches 0.5m using national and local high-resolution sources; and positioning accuracy has been improved by more than double after technical breakthroughs in accuracy control for mountains, plateaus, sparse-control zones and uninhabited areas, addressing long-standing low orthorectified-image geometric precision in western China.

CFTC: week to Aug 25 — net short positions: yen 63,298 contracts; euro 36,352 contracts; pound 44,524 contracts; Swiss franc 19,946 contracts.