Headlines

Ekati Diamond Mine is getting a $115 million loan from the Canadian government to continue operations at the mine and protect jobs, its owner announced Thursday, CBC.ca reported. Jeremy King, CEO of Australia-based Burgundy Diamond Mines, which owns Ekati, said his company was working in the background with the government of the Northwest Territories and came close to shutting the mine down "weeks ago." "We were in a very bleak, or stark, scenario," he said. "It was either this line or we were looking at bankruptcy and shutting the mine down," he said.

The UK Government is unlikely to see most of the £148m it is owed by a faulty PPE supplier linked to Baroness Michelle Mone after the company was wound up, BBC.com reported. PPE Medpro, a consortium run by Mone's husband Douglas Barrowman, was placed into liquidation at the Insolvency and Companies Court on Thursday. It follows a High Court ruling in October, which found that the firm breached a contract to supply 25 million surgical gowns during the Covid pandemic. PPE Medpro filed for administration in September, a day before the order to pay.

Sweden’s financial watchdog has closed its long-running investigation into Alecta’s loss-making investments into three US niche banks, which tipped the pension fund into crisis in 2023, saying it found no breach of the rules, IPE.com reported. The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen, FI) announced this morning: “The investigation has not shown any violations of the rules in the risk management system Alecta has had for assessing investment risks.

Speaking this month at an international finance conference in Tokyo, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi of Japan used an unusual turn of phrase to sell the assembled crowd on her plan to revive the economy, the New York Times reported. “Just shut your mouths and invest everything in me,” Ms. Takaichi declared, quoting a line from the popular manga series “Attack on Titan” — a reference that several in the room admitted was lost on them. “Japan is back. Invest in Japan,” she continued. Ms.

Central banks in big economies are signalling a change of stance as the Bank of Japan raised interest rates to a 30-year high on Friday, Reuters reported. A day earlier the European Central Bank all but confirmed it was done with monetary easing and ​the Bank of England cut rates in a narrow vote as dissenters cautioned about price pressures. Now all eyes are on how dovish the incoming next Federal ‌Reserve will manage to be after some of the U.S.

Canada and the U.S. will launch formal discussions to review their free trade agreement in mid-January, the office of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said, the Associated Press reported. The prime minister confirmed to provincial leaders that Dominic LeBlanc, the country’s point person for U.S-Canada trade relations, “will meet with U.S. counterparts in mid-January to launch formal discussions," Carney’s office said in a statement late Thursday. The United States-Mexico-Canada trade pact, or USMCA, is up for review in 2026. U.S.

European leaders committed to lend Ukraine 90 billion euros, equivalent to around $105 billion, to help the country keep fighting Moscow’s invasion but failed to agree on a plan to use frozen Russian assets for the loan, the Wall Street Journal reported. The vow to loan Ukraine money amounts to a financial lifeline at a crucial moment, but the European Union’s inability to agree on handing Kyiv tens of billions of dollars in Russian funds underlines divisions in the bloc over the extent to which they are prepared to confront Russia.

Within a year of taking office, U.S. president Donald Trump turned global trade on its head. His sweeping tariffs took effect on Aug. 1, and have since upended countless trade relationships countries built through years of diplomacy. Yet despite the U.S.’ tariffs, global trade has been more resilient than expected, say Macquarie’s analysts in their 2026 global economic and market outlook (which was released in December). They’ve even benefitted an unlikely group: Southeast Asian economies, Fortune Magazine reported.

Investors are snapping up yuan credits and surging yuan lending is poised to overtake overseas dollar loans at Chinese banks as attractive pricing helps drive a sustained push by Beijing to put the yuan on the global stage, Reuters reported. China's overseas bank lending has tripled in four years to 2.52 trillion yuan and sales of onshore and offshore yuan debt are at or near records for the second year running. Bankers say the boom is encouraged by cost, because yuan rates are low.

China is expected to leave benchmark lending rates unchanged for a seventh consecutive month in December, a Reuters survey showed, despite a depressed economy and deepening woes in the property sector, Reuters reported. Analysts say China's central bank is not in a hurry to loosen monetary policy as the economy is on track to meet this year's growth target and banks are grappling with record-low margins, but fresh interest rate cuts are likely in early 2026.