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UK small lenders are warning that hundreds of thousands of vulnerable customers could become “mortgage prisoners” if the government does not grant wider access to emergency funding schemes to support credit during the coronavirus pandemic, the Financial Times reported. Non-bank, specialist lenders play a key role in providing home loans to three quarters of a million people who cannot borrow from mainstream banks, as well as financing small businesses and providing consumer finance such as point-of-sale credit.
India deferred deadlines for filing tax returns, extended a tax amnesty program and unveiled other procedural relief steps, while promising more measures to support the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. Tax payers can file their annual returns by June 30 instead of the March 31 deadline for the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in New Delhi Tuesday. Besides rules will be tweaked to check trigger of insolvency cases against companies, and norms relaxed for holding of board meetings, she said.
The global airline industry faces losing more than $250bn in revenues, according to the latest forecast from a trade body that has been forced to slash its outlook again as coronavirus spreads. The hit would amount to a more than 40 per cent fall in revenues from 2019, Iata, the industry trade body warned on Tuesday, the Financial Times reported. It is up from a prediction of $113bn made a few days ago and an initial forecast of $30bn at the start of the crisis.
The challenge of responding to the devastating impact of coronavirus is a defining moment for this generation of economic policymakers, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. Part of that must be a reappraisal of central bank mandates. As governments unleash huge fiscal efforts to combat the economic effects of Covid-19, one risk they face is that yields on government debt start to soar. If that happens, it would undermine the entire public policy response to the coronavirus by making government debt more expensive.
Ecuador has acknowledged it will fail to make coupon payments on three bonds due later this week but insists it will pay up within the 30-day grace period, as it scrambles for cash amid the Covid-19 outbreak and the crash in oil prices, the Financial Times reported. In an online press conference on Monday night, finance minister Richard Martínez said the government would make a $325m payment due on Tuesday on its 2020 bond, but needed more time to come up with $200m to service bonds due in 2022, 2025 and 2030. Coupon payments had been due this Friday and Saturday.
Malaysia’s banks will offer broader loan deferrals that will involve 100 billion ringgit ($23 billion) of funds as the country seeks more ways to soften the pandemic’s impact on its economy, Bloomberg News reported. Banks will offer six-month deferrals for all loans held by individuals and small businesses and let people convert their credit card debt into a three-year term loan, the central bank said in a statement Wednesday.
Singapore is bracing for a further jump in bankruptcies after cases surged to the highest in years even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Bloomberg News reported. The number of individuals filing for bankruptcy soared 47% from a year earlier to 434 in January, the highest since October 2004, according to the latest data from the Law Ministry’s Insolvency Office. Companies in liquidation jumped to 287 last year, the highest since records began in 2005. Singapore’s already-slowing economy is now poised to shrink as the virus slams trade and tourism.
Two of the UK’s largest peer-to-peer platforms are “urgently” seeking access to government schemes and financing to help them keep lending, as the coronavirus pandemic increases the risk of loan defaults by individuals and small businesses, the Financial Times reported. RateSetter, one of the UK’s biggest P2P lenders with more than £800m on its loan book, has called on the Bank of England and the Treasury to allow it access to stimulus schemes that provide liquidity to banks.
India will suspend all domestic flights from midnight Tuesday, the final piece of a nationwide lockdown that threatens Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to revive an economy already expanding at the slowest pace in more than a decade, Bloomberg News reported. The open-ended flight ban compliments a nationwide cancellation of all passenger trains, as authorities try to halt the spread of the coronavirus in the world’s second-most populous nation, and one which has poorly equipped hospitals and inadequate social security.