Fridays are usually good days: the weekend is coming and people are looking forward to kicking back and relaxing. Unfortunately, R&R won’t be on the agenda for Aluminum Corp of China (Chinalco) executives this weekend – they’ll be too busy fretting over the status of their proposed investment in iron ore miner Rio Tinto. Chinalco is apparently willing to cut the size of its desired stake to 15% from 18% in a bid to win over the Australian government and hostile Rio shareholders. But will this be enough given Chinalco’s reported refusal to compromise on its plan to purchase US$12.3 billion worth of large minority stakes in Rio’s assets? Lenovo executives will also be crying into their Friday night beers as the company posted a fiscal fourth quarter loss of US$264 million. A year before the company had a profit of US$140 million for the same period. The drop in computer sales worldwide has caused Lenovo to focus its marketing efforts on China, but the company expects the rebound in computer sales to be slow (though sales in China have increased since the end of 2008) and has cut 2,500 jobs since the start of the year to reduce overhead. Chinese bank heads should start worrying as well. According to a report by Fitch Ratings, the banks’ easy lending policy might come back to haunt them. Chinese banks lent US$758 billion during the first four months of this year. Ninty percent of those loans were to corporations. And since most companies in China have suffered commercially in recent months, they may not be able to pay those loans back, potentially resulting in a big rash of non-performing loans on the banks’ books.