Headlines

Air Vanuatu announced on Thursday that the airline had cancelled international flights for four days and was considering bankruptcy protection for the South Pacific state-owned carrier, the Associated Press reported. It said that international flights were cancelled until Sunday and flights after that day were “under review.” “The Vanuatu government is now considering placing Air Vanuatu into voluntary administration,” a statement said, referring to a local equivalent of a U.S. chapter 11 bankruptcy.

A struggling property developer in southern China has become the litmus test for investors trying to answer that question, the Wall Street Journal reported. China Vanke is one of the biggest survivors of the property downturn, which has pushed real-estate companies to default on $140 billion of dollar bonds, according to S&P Global Ratings. It has also left millions of homes unfinished and fueled widespread alarm about a slump in the world’s second-largest economy.

China Construction Bank Corp., the nation’s third-largest commercial lender, was accused in a US lawsuit of enabling a massive fraud in the reinsurance industry that left companies with “monumental losses” and sinking stock prices, Bloomberg News reported. The bank allowed employees to conspire with Israeli insurance startup Vesttoo Ltd. to sell reinsurance policies that weren’t real, according to a complaint filed late Thursday by the Porch Group in Manhattan federal court.

Swedish homebuilders should start to recover later this year, boosted by the central bank’s decision to cut interest rates before its Eurozone and U.S. peers, Bloomberg News reported. The value of orders is expected to tick up for Sweden’s three largest homebuilders, Skanska AB, Peab AB and NCC AB, brightening the outlook for the industry in the Nordic country. “I would expect new starts to gradually pick up through 2024,” Kepler Cheuvreux analyst Albin Sandberg said in an email, while cautioning that it will “probably take some time” before that turns into stronger demand for new builds.

The U.K. economy returned to growth in the first three months of the year, a sign that the country is beginning to recover from the damage caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported. Gross domestic product between January and March was 0.6% higher than in the previous three-month period, the Office for National Statistics said Friday. It was the U.K.’s strongest performance since the final quarter of 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On an annualized basis, the U.K.

Japan’s households cut spending again in March as sticky inflation weighed on sentiment and government subsidies capped costs for utilities, although policymakers are looking for historic wage hikes to be a catalyst for a recovery in coming months, the Japan Times reported. Real outlays decreased 1.2% from a year before, falling for the 13th consecutive month, the ministry of internal affairs reported Friday. The result compared with economists’ forecast of a 2.3% drop.

New Zealand manufacturing sector showed tentative signs of recovery in April, despite the economy’s lengthening recession, according to the latest BNZ — BusinessNZ Performance of Manufacturing Index, the Wall Street Journal reported. The seasonally adjusted PMI for April was 48.9, up from 46.8 in March, although still lower than the 49.1 recorded in February. The sector has now been in contraction for 14 consecutive months.

China's car exports surged to a record high in April, data showed on Friday, as domestic sales slipped 5.8% from a year earlier amid intensifying price competition and consumers' caution about spending on big items during a shaky economic recovery, Reuters reported. Car exports jumped 38% year-on-year to 417,000 units in April, continuing strong momentum from the previous month which posted a 39% growth in exports, the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) said.

Downside risks for the Pakistani economy remain exceptionally high, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Friday, in its staff report on the country, ahead of talks with the fund on a longer term progamme, Reuters reported. An International Monetary Fund mission is expected to visit Pakistan this month to discuss a new programme, ahead of Islamabad beginning its annual budget-making process for the next financial year. "Downside risks remain exceptionally high.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has registered with India's Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), a senior FIU official said on Friday, as the exchange seeks to resume operations in the country, Reuters reported. The exchange was barred from operating in India in December for non-compliance with local regulations as part of the financial watchdog's crackdown on offshore crypto exchanges that were operating in the country without registration.