The cost of insuring against global bank defaults has plunged to its lowest level since the financial crisis in a sign that investors are willing to bet the industry has become safer, the Financial Times reported. Buyers of bank debt often purchase “credit default swaps,” a type of derivative that helps insure their investments against a default. The price they are paying for that protection is now the lowest since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “We’ve gone back to pre-crisis levels,” said Brian Monteleone, analyst at Barclays.

South Africa’s credit rating was cut to one level above junk by Standard & Poor’s as the longest mining strike in the nation’s history threatens to drag the economy into recession, curbing government revenue, Bloomberg News reported. The foreign-currency rating was lowered to BBB- from BBB and the local-currency rating was reduced to BBB+ from A-, S&P said in a statement yesterday. The outlook on the ratings were raised to stable from negative. Fitch Ratings also lowered the outlook on its BBB grading to negative from stable.

The world must act to contain the risk of another devastating housing crash, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday, as it published new data showing house prices are well above their historical average in many countries, the Financial Times reported. The warning from the IMF shows how an acceleration in global house prices from already high levels has emerged as one of the major threats to economic stability, with countries making limited progress in keeping them under control.

Ghana’s central bank is printing money to help finance the government’s budget deficit, threatening to fuel inflation and weaken a currency that’s already the worst performer in Africa this year, Bloomberg News reported. The first-quarter budget deficit of 2.1 percent of gross domestic product “was financed by the central bank, which provided funding equivalent to 10 percent of government revenue,” Carmen Altenkirch, an analyst at Fitch in London, said in an e-mailed statement today.

Nigeria is seeking buyers for the assets of distressed state-owned former telecom monopoly Nitel, the state-appointed liquidator said on Monday, Reuters reported. Nigeria opted to wind up Nitel in March after almost a decade of struggling to sell it, due to the shambolic state of its fixed lines and high levels of debt, despite the country having one of the world's fastest-growing telecoms markets. The liquidator, appointed by the government's National Council of Privatisation, said in an advert it wanted bidders with five years of telecom experience and a net worth of at least $200 million.

The Chairman of the Law Reform Commission (LRC), Cllr. Jallah Barbu, has recommended to members of the National Legislature to consider the passage of the proposed Insolvency Law, allAfrica reported on an Inquirer story. Giving background of the Insolvency Law at a Legislative Hearing on the Proposed Insolvency Law held at a local hotel on Wednesday, Cllr. Barbu said the key benefit of the law is that it provides detail legal procedures by which businesses having financial trouble and/or that have become insolvent may still manage to rebound. Cllr.

The clouds of the global financial crisis may have lifted, but six years later, the world economy is not creating nearly as many jobs as it was before 2008, a United Nations report on Wednesday concluded, nor is it expected to in the near term. That is a particularly worrisome fact at a time when more young people are entering the job market than ever before, the International New York Times reported. The economies of developed countries are likely to grow at 2 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2015, a faster clip than in the two previous years, the report said.

The war on those stashing undisclosed money offshore intensified this week when 47 countries, including the Group of 20 and some prominent tax havens, sealed a pact that will shake up the sharing of tax information, The Economist reported. Under the present system, countries have to file requests with each other for data on suspected cheats. Even reasonable enquiries are often rejected as “fishing expeditions”. In future the signatories—and dozens of others that will be pressed into joining later—will automatically exchange information once a year.

Yawning deficits and labor turmoil have made South Africa's economy vulnerable to capital flight as investors pull back from risky markets, the country's central bank said Thursday. "The current-account deficit could pose a marked risk to the stability of the domestic financial system," the South African Reserve Bank said in its semiannual review of the country's financial stability, The Wall Street Journal reported.

For a bunch of people who just agreed the global economy is doing better, top officials from the world's rich and poor nations sound rather worried. For poor nations, the easy monetary policies in advanced economies are leading to big swings in capital flows that could destabilize emerging markets. For rich countries, the hoarding of currency by developing nations is blocking progress toward a more stable global economy.