Headlines

In Rome’s central shopping street, Via del Corso, Maria Lipari is looking for a scarf to give to her daughter for Christmas. Like many Italians, she prefers to pay for her festive gifts the old-fashioned way — with cash. But the Italian government hopes to persuade her to change. Italy has one of Europe’s lowest rates of usage of card payments, with 86 per cent of transactions paid for using notes and coins, according to central bank estimates, the Financial Times reported.

Employees’ and contractors’ struggles with Celadon-owned Hyndman over outstanding pay and questions about the fate of leased trucks are compounded by the lack of legal proceedings in Canada, but that could change, FreightWaves reported. Former employees and contractors are facing the staggering challenge of claiming what they say Celadon owes them under Canadian law. Making matters more difficult, Celadon hasn’t filed for bankruptcy in Canada — something that ironically could help former Canadian workers make claims and secure federal benefits.

China has a mounting debt problem. Not just over-leveraged companies, but a rapid build-up on household balance sheets that is hitting records. You can blame youth for a borrowing binge that, if left unchecked, could be China’s next credit bubble, a Bloomberg View reported. Household debt hit levels of 57% of gross domestic product in the third quarter, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Phan, more than double just 27% in 2010. Fitch Ratings said in July that it was surging at a pace roughly double nominal GDP growth.

If 2019 was the year when a clutch of Middle East markets burst into the mainstream, then 2020 will test whether the foreign money keeps flooding in. The year opened with five Gulf Arab economies joining JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s emerging-market bond indexes, Bloomberg News reported. The spotlight stayed firmly on the region as Saudi Aramco’s $12 billion international bond debut in April was followed by preparations for its historic public offering at the end of the year. Gulf dollar bonds outperformed their emerging-market peers with returns of 15% this year.

The Italian government is on the verge of an outright battle with the company that operates more than half of the country’s aging toll roads, Bloomberg News reported. After Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s administration provisionally approved rules on the revocation of highway concessions, operator Autostrade per L’Italia said Dec. 22 they appeared unconstitutional and contrary to European Union norms and would result in the “legal termination” of the concession agreement.

In a related story, the Financial Times reported that corporate defaults in China surged to a record high in 2019, raising new questions over how policymakers in Beijing will manage mounting financial distress among large private and state-owned companies. Onshore corporate defaults hit Rmb130bn ($18.6bn) in the final weeks of the year, breaking the record of Rmb122bn last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, as economic growth fell to a three-decade low.

China’s financial regulators are calling for more transparent and fair handling of defaults to restore investor confidence in the world’s second-largest bond market, after repayment failures hit a record high this year, Bloomberg News reported. Senior officials from the central bank, the securities regulatory body, the supreme court and other departments discussed court-mediated dispute resolution concerning bond defaults at a symposium in Beijing on Tuesday, according to a statement posted on the website of People’s Bank of China.

After a decade-long debt crisis that made Greece a bond-market pariah, the country now enjoys the luxury of having no financing needs for 2020. Yet the government’s 2020 budget shows it still plans to sell new debt, Bloomberg News reported. Despite a cash buffer of some 32 billion euros ($35.6 billion) left over from the country’s bailout program, Greece wants to maintain the good momentum of 2019 after yields hit record low levels in October.

A source close to Atlantia's motorway unit warned on Monday the company would go bankrupt if the government revoked its concession without compensation following the deadly collapse of a bridge last year, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The source said that the company, Autostrade per l'Italia (ASPI), would be unable to pay back 10.8 billion euros ($12 billion) in debt if it were stripped of its motorway concession without receiving any indemnity.

Nemaska Lithium, a Canadian lithium producer backed by SoftBank, has filed for bankruptcy protection as it scrambles to raise emergency funding to keep its flagship project alive, the Financial Times reported. The Toronto-listed company has been struggling to finance development of Whabouchi, a lithium mine and processing facility in Quebec, amid a cost blowout and a steep fall in the price of the metal, a constituent of electric car batteries. Nemaska on Monday said it was seeking protection from its creditors to give it sufficient time to complete a refinancing.