Headlines

France’s Credit Agricole offered to buy third-tier Italian lender Creval for 737 million euros ($875 million) on Monday, as a wave of consolidation sweeps Italy’s banking sector, Reuters reported. France’s No.2 bank had been considering expanding in Italy, its second biggest market, and both Creval and larger rival Banco BPM had been tipped as possible targets. Credit Agricole Italia will pay 10.5 euros per Creval share, a 21.4% premium on Friday’s closing price. Shares in Creval jumped 23.7% slightly surpassing the offer’s price. Credit Agricole closed up 3.9%. Banco BPM declined 3.7%.

The trio of coronavirus vaccines racing toward approval may reach the masses too late to prevent another round of airline failures, Bloomberg News reported. With last week’s insolvency filing at Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA, some 42 airlines worldwide have failed or entered administration this year, according to research from consultant IBA Group. The tally may surpass 70 through March, as rising cases weigh on revenue and carriers struggle to secure fresh funding. “The fourth quarter and the first quarter of next year could be equally terrible,” IBA’s Stuart Hatcher said in an interview.

Irish food group Greencore has announced a £90 million (€101 million) share placing to shore up its balance sheet after it reported an 81 per cent plunge in its annual profit due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Irish Times reported. The Dublin-headquartered company said the recent resurgence of Covid-19 cases across the UK, and the imposition of new restrictions, had “hampered the recovery in demand in food-to-go categories”.

Eurozone business activity has hit a six-month low as fresh restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus weigh on the services sector, fuelling the likelihood of a double-dip economic downturn, according to a widely watched survey, the Financial Times reported. Services activity across the single-currency bloc plunged into decline in November according to the IHS Markit flash purchasing managers’ index for the sector, which hit 41.3, down from 46.9 in the previous month and the lowest level since this spring’s lockdowns.

In 2010, as the global economy was beginning to recover from the financial crisis that had taken place just two years before, the UK placed itself in the vanguard of a shift towards austerity, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. The decade of weak growth and political instability that followed mean that few are keen to repeat the exercise after the coronavirus pandemic.

French food company Danone will cut up 2,000 jobs, or 2 per cent of its global workforce, as part of a reorganisation aimed at giving more power to country managers and squeezing out efficiencies to cope with the pandemic, The Irish Times reported. The company employs about 350 people in the Republic. It said it does not yet know whether any Irish jobs will be affected. The maker of Evian bottled water and Activia yoghurts said the changes would save €1 billion by 2023, and promised that its recurring operating margin would return to pre-Covid levels of above 15 per cent by 2022.

Sixty-year-old Yashiro Haga is folding his Tokyo noodle ramen shop after 15 years in December, unable to overcome the prospect of a lasting customer slump due to the coronavirus crisis, Reuters reported. “The flow of people has changed due to the coronavirus,” Haga said, standing behind the counter of his ground-floor shop, Shirohachi.

When a state-owned coal company in central China defaulted on a bond worth $152m this month, the slip-up seemed unlikely to send tremors through the world’s second-largest economy, the Financial Times reported. Prior to the default by Yongcheng Coal and Electricity Holding Group on November 10, only five Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) had failed to pay back bondholders in the first 10 months of 2020, according to Fitch Ratings — consistent with levels in recent years. But within a fortnight, Tsinghua Unigroup, a high-profile state technology group, would also default.

Lockdowns in France and Italy are weighing down public mobility more than in other European countries, according to high- frequency data compiled by Reuters that suggest the two economies will take a correspondingly bigger hit, Reuters reported. Data ranging from use of Apple maps apps to Google’s user location history are proving vital tools for governments, central bankers and investors trying to gauge the economic impact of restrictions, weeks in advance of conventional indicators like consumer spending or industrial output.

Italy will use its forthcoming presidency of the Group of 20 major global economies to try to secure further debt relief for African states, a senior Italian diplomat said on Friday, Reuters reported. Italy takes over the annual rotating presidency of the G20 on Dec. 1 and will look to build on a deal struck by major international creditors in April that was aimed at relieving the world’s poorest nations of debt payments.