Australia’s fiscal authorities are taking a leaf out of U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s playbook in deploying spending to push the economy toward maximum employment, a stance that keeps policy aligned with the Reserve Bank, Bloomberg News reported. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg says he will deliver a “jobs budget” on Tuesday that’s expected to boost spending on roads and railways to support hiring and extend income-tax breaks for low and middle income earners to keep them spending.
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Resources Per Country
- Afghanistan
- Armenia
- Australia
- Azerbaijan
- Bangladesh
- Brunei
- Cambodia
- China
- Cook Islands
- Cyprus
- Fiji
- Georgia
- Hong Kong
- India
- Indonesia
- Japan
- Kazakhstan
- Kyrgyzstan
- Laos
- Macau
- Malaysia
- Maldives
- Mongolia
- Myanmar
- Nepal
- New Zealand
- North Korea
- Pakistan
- Papua New Guinea
- Philippines
- Singapore
- South Korea
- Sri Lanka
- Taiwan
- Tajikistan
- Thailand
- Turkey
- Uzbekistan
- Vanuatu
- Vietnam
The National Company Law Tribunal’s (NCLT) Delhi bench has appointed an Interim Resolution Professional (IRP) to start a Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process (CIRP) against Ahluwalia Contracts (India) Ltd., the Hindu Business Line reported. This follows a prayer moved by New Delhi-based A2 Interiors Products Pvt Ltd, alleging pending payments of ₹14.10 crore for various civil and electrical works done for the Ahluwalia Contracts, a civil contractor in the construction industry.
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Israel will sign a free trade agreement with South Korea this week, marking the first such arrangement with an Asian market, Israel's economy ministry said on Sunday, Reuters reported. The deal is meant to bolster bilateral trade by cutting out customs duties and offering safety nets on investments. Bilateral trade reached about $2.4 billion in 2020, about two thirds of it goods and services imported into Israel, the ministry said. The deal will be signed this week in Seoul during a visit by Israel's foreign affairs and economy ministers.
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Australia’s trade minister said the country’s international borders may not completely open until the second half of 2022, a longer-than-anticipated closure that would be a blow to the airline and tourism industries, Bloomberg News reported. In an interview with Sky News early on Friday, Dan Tehan was asked when Australia’s borders might open. “The best guess would be in the middle to the second half of next year, but as we’ve seen throughout this pandemic things can change,” Tehan said, according to audio of the conversation sent by his office.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga extended a state of emergency that covers Tokyo and expanded it to two more regions hit by rising virus cases, in an attempt to stem infections ahead of the capital’s hosting of the Olympics in less than three months, Bloomberg News reported. The move announced on Friday adds the industrial region of Aichi and the southern prefecture of Fukuoka to areas subject to restrictions. It also extends the state of emergency already in place for Tokyo, Osaka, Hyogo and Kyoto until the end of May.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan Sunday thanked the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for timely providing financial assistance to Pakistan back in 2018 when PTI took over the ailing economy, Daily Pakistan reported. Addressing Pakistani community at a ceremony in connection with Roshan Digital Account, the premier said that Pakistan could have defaulted on international debt payments if Saudi Arabia had not extended the helping hand in that tough times. Back in October 2020, the Kingdom had announced a $6 billion bailout package for Pakistan’s shaky economy.
India’s airlines are under renewed pressure to raise cash or face the risk of having to downsize, consolidate or have their planes repossessed by lessors as a surge of COVID-19 infections roils travel, Reuters reported. Passenger traffic fell by nearly 30% in April from a month before and has halved again so far in May, forcing even the country's biggest and most cashed-up carrier, IndiGo, to act.
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Turkey’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged for a second meeting on Thursday, pledging to maintain its “current” policy stance until there’s a significant drop in inflation, Bloomberg News reported. The Monetary Policy Committee left its key rate at 19% as forecast by all analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Inflation accelerated for a seventh month in April to 17.1%, spurred on by a weak lira and rising global energy prices. But new bank Governor Sahap Kavcioglu predicted the pace of price gains had peaked and would now start dropping to 12.2% by the end of 2021.
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For decades, France’s Valdunes SAS charged premium prices for the wheels it made for high-speed trains and other rail systems around the world. That strategy changed after a Chinese state-owned industrial conglomerate bought the company in 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new owner, Maanshan Iron & Steel Co. , or MA Steel, slashed prices in a bid to dominate the market. “We were told that we shouldn’t miss a single order. That was explicit,” recalled Jérôme Duchange, Valdunes’s former top executive in France.
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Liberty Steel Group said on Wednesday that it had appointed a committee to restructure and refinance the group after Greensill Capital, its biggest lender, filed for insolvency in March, Reuters reported. The move comes after Sanjeev Gupta’s family conglomerate GFG Alliance announced that its Australian unit had agreed terms to refinance its exposure to Greensill. Liberty Steel, which is also under the GFG umbrella, said in a statement that four new board directors would form a Restructuring and Transformation Committee (RTC) to focus on fixing or selling underperforming units.
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