After a decade-long debt crisis that made Greece a bond-market pariah, the country now enjoys the luxury of having no financing needs for 2020. Yet the government’s 2020 budget shows it still plans to sell new debt, Bloomberg News reported. Despite a cash buffer of some 32 billion euros ($35.6 billion) left over from the country’s bailout program, Greece wants to maintain the good momentum of 2019 after yields hit record low levels in October.

A source close to Atlantia's motorway unit warned on Monday the company would go bankrupt if the government revoked its concession without compensation following the deadly collapse of a bridge last year, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The source said that the company, Autostrade per l'Italia (ASPI), would be unable to pay back 10.8 billion euros ($12 billion) in debt if it were stripped of its motorway concession without receiving any indemnity.

French marine services group Bourbon Corporation, which has been in a court restructuring process after its business was hit by volatile energy markets, said its assets would be taken over by its creditor banks, Reuters reported. Bourbon said the Marseille commercial court had ruled that Bourbon’s assets would be transferred to Société Phocéenne de Participations (SPP) from Jan. 2, 2020.

When Mexican food chain Chilango offered customers the chance to invest in its “burrito bonds” last year, it promised annual returns of 8 per cent and free food for life. It was part of a new wave of early stage restaurant businesses that have found creative — and sometimes risky — ways to finance their expansion at a time when cost pressures and competition in the sector are at all time highs, the Financial Times reported.

Eurozone bond yields rose on Wednesday after more upbeat European economic data helped offset some of the anxiety about a new Brexit cliff-edge that boosted demand for safe-haven government debt a day earlier, The Trust Project reported. Investors have been dumping eurozone government debt for riskier assets in recent weeks on signs the economy is rebounding and in anticipation of an agreement on the first phase of a trade deal between Washington and Beijing. Read more

U.K. retail sales posted a surprise fall in November, marking a fourth straight month without growth for the first time since at least 1996, Bloomberg News reported. The volume of goods sold in stores and online fell 0.6%, the largest decline this year, the Office for National Statistics said Thursday. Economists had expected a 0.2% increase. Sales excluding auto fuel also dropped 0.6%. The headline measure has now failed to increase since July, the longest period without an expansion since the ONS’s records began 23 years ago.

An influential global watchdog has warned that the vast market for leveraged loans has become increasingly vulnerable to shocks, in a move that could heighten regulatory scrutiny of the risks surrounding corporate debt, the Financial  Times reported. The Basel-based Financial Stability Board said in a report on Thursday that the recent rapid growth in leveraged loans — credit for lowly rated, more indebted companies — has been accompanied by a weakening of protections for lenders that has not been fully priced into markets.

Britain took a step into uncharted territory this year, aiming to make its banks safer. But it might have just driven risk to places where it’s less manageable than before, Bloomberg News reported. The experiment -- the result of an analysis of how the financial crisis damaged Britain’s economy -- began Jan. 1. Big lenders were “ring-fenced”: retail deposit-taking was legally separated from riskier activities, primarily investment banking. Advocates compared ring-fencing to the U.S. Glass-Steagall act, passed after the 1929 crash.

Tarom (RO, Bucharest Otopeni) is to receive two batches of funding from the Romanian state coffers in order to stabilise the ailing carrier and then to allow it to restructure going forward, ch-aviation reported. The country's Transport Minister Lucian Bode announced on B1 TV, the Romanian television network, which was then subsequently reported on news.ro, that he will discuss the possibility of handing over EUR157 million euro (USD 175 million) to Tarom with the European Commission in Brussels.

As part of a global restructuring plan, the staff of ESL UK have taken voluntary redundancy (layoffs), the regional entity’s Managing Director James Dean has confirmed, The Esports Observer reported. Event UK series such as the ESL Premiership will continue under the support of centralized teams in Poland and Germany.  “The ESL UK mission has always been to grow UK esports and we remain 100% committed to that cause,” said Dean in a press release.