Headlines

Less than a month after Argentina’s $65 billion debt restructuring, bond prices show growing concern the government may struggle to pay its obligations, Bloomberg News reported. The country’s yield curve has inverted in the week since officials announced foreign-exchange restrictions to help conserve cash. Investors perceived the move as an act of desperation instead of a workable solution to stem the drain in foreign reserves, and prices for short-term bonds dropped.

India’s corporate affairs ministry is proposing to extend a suspension of new bankruptcy filings that has been in place since earlier this year, people familiar with the matter said, Bloomberg News reported. The proposal is to extend the halt on new bankruptcy cases for another six months past its currently scheduled ending point this week. It must get final approval from Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.

Mexico’s finance ministry and banking regulator extended tools to allow banks and financial intermediaries to restructure loans and other credits to clients, senior officials said Wednesday, in the government’s latest push to help an ailing economy, Reuters reported. The measures will extend until next year several temporary rules designed to avoid defaults and loss of collateral, in what Finance Minister Arturo said was a recognition that the economy will remain fragile for some time.

Argentina’s unemployment rate jumped to 13.1% in the second quarter of the year as the country was swiped by the coronavirus pandemic, the official statistics agency said on Wednesday, the highest since 2004 and up from 10.4% in the previous quarter, Reuters reported. Argentina imposed a strict lockdown in mid-March, hitting an already shaky economy in recession since 2018 and leaving many businesses struggling to survive. The country now has over 650,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

Airline Avianca Holdings came under broad criticism in Colombia for paying its top two executives $6 million in bonuses in May, at a time when the carrier had furloughed most of its employees without pay and was preparing a bankruptcy filing, Reuters reported. According to bankruptcy court documents submitted by Avianca itself, the airline paid Chief Executive Anco van der Werff $3.7 million and paid Chief Financial Officer Adrian Neuhauser $2.8 million on May 6. Five days later, the airline filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S.

Australia on Thursday unveiled its biggest shakeup in bankruptcy laws in nearly three decades, allowing businesses to trade while insolvent and take more control over debt restructuring, in a bid to help firms through the coronavirus crisis, Reuters reported. Under the proposed rule changes, businesses with liabilities of less than A$1 million ($708,000) will be able to keep operating while they come up with a debt restructuring plan, rather than be placed in the hands of administrators.

Nearly 36,000 Japanese companies have chosen to discontinue their business so far this year, mainly due to the hit from the coronavirus crisis and up sharply from a year ago in a sign of the pain the pandemic is inflicting on the fragile economy, Reuters reported. The total number of companies closing businesses, without going through bankruptcy procedures, may top 53,000 by year-end. That would be the most since relevant data became available in 2000, Tokyo Shoko Research said on Wednesday.

Small businesses in India, already struggling amid the pandemic, are now having to repay mounting debt after a loan holiday ended last month, Bloomberg News reported. The Reserve Bank of India gave borrowers a six-month freeze on their loan repayments, which ended on Aug. 31, with about a third of India’s $1.8 trillion outstanding loans being deferred under the program. Businesses still trying to cope with a collapse in demand must now figure out how to pay back their loans or face closure. That’s a dilemma Regi Philip is dealing with.

Appellate tribunal NCLAT has directed that a plea by JM Financial Asset Reconstruction Company to initiate insolvency proceedings against Samay Electronics be placed before a third member of the NCLT Ahmedabad bench after two other members of the same bench gave a split verdict in the matter, Outlook reported. The two-member Ahmedabad bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) had delivered the split verdict on February 26, 2020.

China jolted markets in 2019 with three high-profile bank rescues that imposed losses on some investors, Bloomberg News reported. The appetite for experimenting with greater market discipline has been crushed by the coronavirus pandemic. 2020 has become the year of stealth rescues as authorities try to preempt bank failures and ensure stability for an industry at the forefront of cushioning the virus-induced economic slump.