JAPAN

Brokerages Urged to Check Records: The Finance Ministry this week will urge the nation’s major 48 brokerage firms to check their business records to ensure that their financial condition is sound. The move is aimed at finding possible cases of tobashi, the Nihon Keizai newspaper said. Tobashi is a bookkeeping practice involving sales of stocks to clients with a promise that the broker will buy back the shares, often at a higher price, later. Many securities companies shift losses between different client accounts this way to avoid clients reporting a deficit at year end.