Headlines

China’s central bank is likely to inject cash into the financial system Tuesday, helping lenders with their year-end liquidity needs, Bloomberg News reported. With some 600 billion yuan ($92 billion) of one-year loans maturing in December, the People’s Bank of China is expected to offer as much as 800 billion yuan in funding to banks, according to Huachuang Securities Co. That would be the fifth straight month of net injections via the medium-term lending facility.

Germany is heading for a double-dip recession this winter after Berlin imposed a hard lockdown, economists have predicted, denting hopes that Europe’s largest economy will rebound to pre-pandemic levels by the start of 2022, the Financial Times reported. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government announced at the weekend that schools and most shops would be closed from Wednesday until January 10 in an effort to contain a surge in coronavirus infections. “Germany must brace itself for a second recession,” said Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank.

TIM Participacoes, Telefonica Brasil SA and America Movil SAB de CV’s Claro won an auction on Monday to acquire the mobile operations of Brazil’s Oi SA with a joint bid of 16.5 billion reais ($3.23 billion), the companies said in a series of securities filings, Reuters reported. The winning trio, which had submitted an initial bid in July, plans to split Oi’s assets once they have antitrust approval. Oi, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, is selling assets to repay creditors. The group was the auction’s sole bidder, according to the filings.

The world’s policy makers must act urgently if they are to head off a looming solvency crisis that could cripple economies after the pandemic, according to a report led by two top former central bankers, Bloomberg News reported. Mario Draghi, previously president of the European Central Bank, and Raghuram Rajan, the ex-governor of the Reserve Bank of India, headed a Group of 30 study that looked at the response to the crisis.

Argentina’s Peronist government has had a wild ride in its first year of government: a sovereign default, mammoth debt restructurings, sliding reserves, a currency crisis and a weak economy battered by COVID-19, Reuters reported. There have been wins and losses since taking office in December last year. Debt deals were struck that allowed the government to revamp some $110 billion in foreign currency bonds and push repayments well into the future. Crunch talks with the International Monetary Fund remain positive.

Struggling Finnish retailer Stockmann plans to sell and lease back its flagship department store properties located in Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga in order to save itself from bankruptcy, it said on Monday, Reuters reported. In April, Stockmann filed for corporate restructuring, a form of administration in which a court appointee is charged with restructuring the company to avoid bankruptcy.

The Chinese clothing maker that controls brands including The Lycra Company and Gieves & Hawkes revealed on Monday that it had failed to pay back investors on a $153m bond, the latest in a string of defaults in the country, the Financial Times reported. Shandong Ruyi Technology Group, which has struggled to cope with a heavy debt load after a series of high-profile international acquisitions, said in a filing that it had failed to repay the principal and interest on a Rmb1bn bond that came due on Monday.

The parties in Germany’s ruling coalition have agreed to extend a freeze on insolvency rules put in place to avoid a wave of corporate bankruptcies due to the coronavirus crisis, officials said on Monday, Reuters reported. In March, the government offered respite to companies that find themselves in financial trouble due to the pandemic by allowing them to delay filing for bankruptcy until the end of September. The coalition parties later agreed to extend the insolvency waiver until the end of this year for indebted but still solvent companies.

Chinese stocks suffered their worst weekly decline since September, as concern over high valuations and the tightening supply of cash weighed on the market, Bloomberg News reported. The CSI 300 Index dropped 1% Friday, extending this week’s loss to 3.5%. That’s the worst performance among global benchmarks. Brokerages -- whose shares are typically an indicator of investor sentiment -- have suffered some of the biggest losses in the past five sessions. A gauge of financial stocks slumped 5.4% this week, the most since state media criticized one of China’s most popular stocks in mid-July.

Germany has promised to investigate after the head of the body that regulates auditors told lawmakers he had traded in Wirecard shares weeks before the payment services company collapsed amid massive fraud allegations, Reuters reported. As head of audit regulator APAS, Ralf Bose was responsible for regulating EY, which audited Wirecard’s accounts for years until the company collapsed following the discovery of a 1.9 billion euro ($2.3 billion) hole in its accounts.