Headlines

When Mario Draghi ran the European Central Bank, he pushed, unsuccessfully, to get the region’s feeble banks to merge and clean themselves up. Now as Italy’s prime minister, he is trying again, hoping to spur a consolidation wave among the country’s beleaguered lenders, the Wall Street Journal reported. Italy’s banking sector, stuffed with soured loans and weighed down by high costs, has long loomed as the weakest link among countries that share the euro currency. Last week Mr.

The head of global airline body IATA expects the industry to emerge from the coronavirus crisis smaller and more cautious, doubting airlines will try to expand through acquisitions, Reuters reported. The airline industry has been crippled by the pandemic, which continues to leave many aircraft around the world grounded or flying near-empty as demand limps towards a recovery. "It will be a smaller industry. We are not going to recover all the capacity," International Air Transport Association (IATA) Director General Willie Walsh said in a pre-recorded online interview broadcast on Monday.

China’s repo market shows just how risky China Huarong Asset Management Co.’s bonds are perceived to be within the mainland, despite being majority-owned by the finance ministry, Bloomberg News reported. Borrowers putting up a Huarong Securities 2023 bond for collateral now get just 40% of the note’s face value as cash, down from 91% at the start of April, according to China Securities Depository and Clearing Corp. data. The decline in effective value illustrates the stunning loss of confidence in a company that’s crucial to China’s banking system.

The Tokyo Olympics, postponed in 2020 during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, are facing increasing hurdles in putting on a 2021 show, CNN.com reported. The latest troubling sign for the Summer Games came on Monday when the State Department advised U.S. citizens against traveling to Japan because of a sharp increase in Covid-19 cases. The "Level 4: Do Not Travel" advisory is the highest cautionary level in the department's hierarchy of warnings. It's been more than a year since Americans have paid tourist calls to the nation. Japan has been closed to U.S.

The British government confirmed plans to charge EU citizens and other foreign nationals to visit, as part of a wider reform aimed at making the border more secure, Politico reported. Home Secretary Priti Patel said on Monday that her department will pass legislation to introduce a new Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) that she argued will help the government track with more accuracy the number of people entering and leaving the U.K. It will apply to visitors without a visa or immigration status, except British and Irish citizens.

Promoters, managing directors and chairmen, who stand as personal guarantors to corporate loans, can also be proceeded against before the company law tribunal if their firms are unable to repay debts, ruled the Indian Supreme Court on Friday as it declared “legal and valid” a November 15, 2019, notification issued by the Union government under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), the Hindustan Times reported. “It is held that the impugned notification was issued within the power granted by Parliament, and in valid exercise of it.

PT Garuda Indonesia needs to completely restructure its business, potentially reducing the number of planes it operates to less than half its main fleet as the airline seeks to survive the crisis wrought by the pandemic, its president told staff last week, Bloomberg News reported. “We have to go through a comprehensive restructuring, a total one,” President Director Irfan Setiaputra said in an address to staff on May 19, according to a recording heard by Bloomberg.

Norwegian Air is set to exit its restructuring process next week after raising the 6 billion Norwegian crowns ($714 million) it targeted through the sale of perpetual bonds, new shares and a rights issue, Reuters reported. Financed largely by debt, Norwegian Air grew rapidly, serving routes across Europe and flying to North and South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East before the COVID-19 pandemic plunged the budget airline into crisis.

Covid-19 bankrupts a travel-industry power player. Investors dump its securities. But wait: vaccines roll out, economies reopen, and that once-doomed firm looks pretty attractive to traders once again. The tale of Latam Airlines Group SA’s Chapter 11 case is looking eerily similar to that of Hertz Global Holdings Inc. in some respects, Bloomberg News reported. Both went bankrupt as the virus raged. Both were in decent financial shape before the pandemic ground travel to a halt.