Monetary policy in Canada wouldn’t be as restrictive if elected officials had restrained their spending in recent years, according to economists at the Bank of Nova Scotia, Bloomberg News reported. Roughly 200 basis points of interest rate tightening stems from the combined program spending and consumption by Canada’s federal and provincial governments since the pandemic, Scotiabank economists Jean-François Perrault and Rene Lalonde wrote in a report to investors.
Israel's jobless rate surged to near 10% in October, the Central Bureau of Statistics said on Monday, after the outbreak of war with Palestinian Hamas militants led to tens of thousands of displaced citizens who had lived near the Gaza border, Reuters reported. The main unemployment rate held steady at 3.4% last month. But when taking into account what is expected to be a temporary loss of work, the rate reached 9.6% in October as 428,400 people were jobless versus 163,600 in September, prior to the Oct. 7 attack when Hamas gunmen rampaged though Israeli border towns.
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told Reuters on Friday the Fund was "seriously considering" a possible augmentation of Egypt's $3 billion loan program due to economic difficulties posed by the Israel-Hamas war, Reuters reported.
After a major default, investor attention usually turns to the potential payout from credit default swaps, a type of security that acts as insurance against bankruptcy. But when one of China’s biggest property developers missed a coupon on its bonds late last month, few bothered to check whether there would be any money up for grabs, Bloomberg News reported. That’s because China’s CDS market is much less developed than in most major economies, meaning that many of the investors that bought Country Garden Holdings Ltd’s $10 billion of dollar bonds did so without hedging against default.
Grounded Indian airline Go First has received an expression of interest (EoI) from Jindal Power Ltd, two banking sources and two people aware of the development told Reuters. An EoI is the first step in the bidding process and may not result in a financial bid. "Jindal Power was the sole successful applicant whose expression of interest was accepted by banks," said a banker with a state-run bank that has exposure to Go First.
Deutsche Bank AG squared off against the U.S. parent company of Lehman Brothers in a London court this week, hoping to squeeze more money from obscure notes issued by the long-dead bank’s U.K. arm, Bloomberg News reported. The German lender argued that it should be paid money recovered from the U.K. unit ahead of the company’s U.S. parent. Deutsche Bank is leading the case as a holder of a certain type of junior security issued from Lehman’s European unit.
As more Chinese property developers move towards restructuring billions of dollars of debt, their offshore creditors are expected to face another setback - the prospects of revamp terms being tightened due to a worsening outlook for the county's real estate sector, Reuters reported. So far, developers accounting for 40% of Chinese home sales have defaulted on their debt obligations since 2021, according to JPMorgan. Those defaulted companies, mostly private, have issued around $110 billion worth of high-yield offshore bonds.
Israel has frozen cryptocurrency accounts used to solicit donations for the Palestinian militant group Hamas on social media, police said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Hamas launched devastating attacks from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, in one of the most serious escalations in the Israel-Palestinian conflict in years. "According to suspicions, with the outbreak of the war, Hamas' terrorist organisation initiated a fundraising campaign on social networks, urging the public to deposit cryptocurrencies into their accounts," a police statement said.
Finnish e-bike drive system Revonte has filed for bankruptcy and is selling its IP, Tech.EU reported. The startup successfully raised a €2 million Seed round in 2019 but has struggled to secure further funding forcing the decision. The unease in the e-bike market could be a result of the slowdown of sales post-Covid boom but it might also be about time there is some consolidation in the market — for companies like Revonte their hand has been forced in these trickier fundraising times.
After weathering decades of deflation and stagnant growth, Japan is seeing an investment boom that has made apartments in central Tokyo unaffordable for young Japanese professionals, Reuters reported. The flood of investment drove the average price for a new condominium in central Tokyo up 60% to a record 129.6 million yen ($865,000) in the first half of this year, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute. For locals, the surge in prices has made Tokyo the second most unaffordable city worldwide, only behind Hong Kong, according to a UBS global real estate report.