The High Court has appointed an interim examiner to the company that operates the Iceland chain of retail stores in Ireland, the Irish Examiner reported. The court heard Metron Stores Limited, which is in difficulties due to factors including a recent order served on it by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland requiring it to withdraw all imported frozen food of animal origin from its stores, is insolvent and unable to pay estimated debts of €36m as they fall due.
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Britain’s inflation rate held steady in May, frustrating expectations that price increases would slow down, according to data released Wednesday, the day before the country’s central bank is widely expected to raise interest rates again, the New York Times reported. Consumer prices rose 8.7 percent from a year earlier, the same as in April, the Office for National Statistics said. Economists had forecast it would dip slightly.
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The French economy is on course to avoid a recession this year while inflation pressures ease though growth and will only gradually pick up in the coming two years, the central bank forecast on Wednesday, Reuters reported. In its quarterly outlook, the Bank of France said the euro zone's second-biggest economy would grow 0.1% in the current quarter from the previous three months and 0.2% in both the third and fourth quarters.
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Hungary is likely to lower its key interest rate for the second straight month after central bankers signaled a retreat from a tightening cycle that brought borrowing costs to a European Union high, Bloomberg News reported. The central bank in Budapest will reduce the overnight deposit rate by a full percentage point to 16% on Tuesday, according to all eight economists surveyed in a Bloomberg poll. The decision, along with fresh inflation projections, will be communicated in a statement and a press conference at 3 p.m. local time.
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Investigations into bankruptcy cases netted more than €6 million of so-called hidden assets last year, the Irish Times reported. Official assignees in cases run by the Insolvency Service of Ireland (ISI) carried out 185 investigations around bankruptcies, according to the ISI’s 2022 annual report. During bankruptcy proceedings a person’s assets are transferred to the official assignee. The official assignee then sells those assets to cover the bankrupt’s debts.
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Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel kicked off warnings from hawkish officials that the European Central Bank’s historic campaign of interest-rate hikes may need to extend into the fall, Bloomberg News reported. “As I see it, we still have more ground to cover,” Nagel said Friday in a speech. “We may need to keep raising rates after the summer break.” That prospect was backed by policymakers from Austria, Slovenia and Lithuania. Belgian central bank chief Pierre Wunsch even suggested monetary tightening might need to persist beyond September.
The European Central Bank raised euro zone borrowing costs to their highest level in 22 years on Thursday and said stubbornly high inflation all but guaranteed another move next month and likely beyond that too, Reuters reported. The quarter-percentage-point move was the ECB's eighth consecutive interest rate hike since it badly misjudged the tenaciousness of price rises early last year, and took its policy rate to 3.5%, a level not seen since 2001.
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Bedlam in Britain's 1.5 trillion-pound ($1.9 trillion) mortgage market, fuelled by ructions in money markets, threatens to trigger a renewed slump in housing activity and financial pain for homeowners on a par with the late 1980s, Reuters reported. Lenders have repeatedly re-priced and pulled home loan offerings in recent weeks in a scramble to keep up with soaring funding costs, spurred by expectations for more interest rate hikes from the Bank of England as it battles stubbornly high inflation.
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More time for debt reduction in new EU fiscal rules would have some advantages but common debt cutting benchmarks are still needed, a draft opinion piece by the German finance minister said, Reuters reported. Fiscal rules underpin the value of the euro by preventing excessive government borrowing, but a surge in public debt caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine has rendered them obsolete and reform is now being discussed.
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With U.K. economic data this week suggesting that the Bank of England has a lot more to do to get inflation under control, the yield spread of sterling investment-grade bonds over their dollar peers has been widening fast, Bloomberg News reported. A 21 basis point jump this week took the spread to the widest since October, when the UK market was recovering from the turmoil caused by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’s ill-fated budget. The indexes have a one-day lag.
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