Beijing told insurers to buy more shares

Beijing ordered the country’s largest insurance companies to buy more publicly traded shares earlier this month to help support the flagging stock market, the Financial Times reported. On October 17, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission summoned the leaders of China’s largest state-controlled insurance groups and told them to play a stabilizing role in the stock market, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. Since then, Chinese insurers have sharply reduced their net sales of publicly traded stocks. China Life, Ping An and China Pacific, the country’s three largest insurers, reported large falls in third-quarter profits, driven by investment losses from the stock market decline.