Headlines

Hobbled by recession and one of the world’s highest inflation rates, Argentina may be lurching toward the next in a series of economic crises afflicting the country over the last 70 years, Reuters reported. Consumer prices streaked more than 54 percent higher in the 12 months through March in defiance of central bank efforts to control inflation, fueling poverty and further damaging a business climate blighted by nose-bleed high borrowing rates. The peso, which lost 50.5 percent of its value against the U.S.

China’s banking and insurance regulator has issued draft rules outlining tougher norms for risk assessment of banks, as part of Beijing’s efforts to rein in financial risks, The Wall Street Journal reported. According to the draft rules released by the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission on Tuesday, banks will have to recognize not only nonperforming loans but also defaulted bonds, interbank assets and other investment as nonperforming assets.

Credit Suisse Group AG’s recent shareholder meeting took an awkward turn when a Mozambican activist questioned Chairman Urs Rohner over the bank’s role in fraudulent deals that saddled her country with $2 billion of debt, The Wall Street Journal reported. The confrontation halfway through Friday’s meeting was the latest example of the rising international pressure on Credit Suisse to forgive loans it made to Mozambican state-owned companies engaged in an alleged complex fraud, and potentially, to pay damages to victims.

The financial crisis has caused a “split in society” in some European countries due to the “deep scars” of a lost economic decade that are still affecting workers’ chances, new research has warned, the Financial Times reported. Although aggregate growth across the continent is rebounding after a weak end to last year, economic activity and employment in some areas are yet to surpass the levels achieved more than a decade ago, the report by economists at Dutch bank ING found.

When investors dumped Argentine bonds en masse just as copies of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s autobiography Sincerely began to fly off the shelves last week, it gave new meaning to the term “bestseller,” the Financial Times reported. The asset sell-off took place as all emerging markets were suffering from the strengthening US dollar.

UK manufacturing growth slowed in April as companies eased their stockpiling following the delay of Brexit and new export orders declined, according to a survey of executives, the Financial Times reported. The IHS Markit manufacturing purchasing managers’ index dropped to 53.1 in April, from 55.1 in the previous month, in line with the expectations of economists polled by Reuters. The survey covers last month, when the UK’s exit from the EU was delayed to the end of October after MPs repeatedly voted down Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU.

Some of Metro Bank’s largest customers left the bank after the discovery of a historic accounting error in the first quarter, damaging growth at the under-fire British lender, the Financial Times reported. Chief executive Craig Donaldson said “adverse sentiment” had led to the departure of a “small number of large commercial and partnership customers”, contributing to a 4 per cent quarter-on-quarter reduction in deposits. Metro Bank in January revealed that it had miscategorised a large number of commercial loans, meaning it did not have as much capital against them as it should.

Philip Green is racing to secure the future of his retail group Arcadia, promising to invest £100m in the company as it seeks creditor support for what promises to be one of the most complex restructurings on the UK high street, the Financial Times reported. The owner of chains including Topshop and Dorothy Perkins is locked in tense negotiations with landlords and the pensions regulator over plans to cut rents and close a swath of stores in the face of sinking sales in its UK shops and persistent discounting by high-street rivals.

South Korea needs another economic overhaul like the one following the International Monetary Fund bailout in the late-1990s to stay competitive globally, according to a major global restructuring consulting firm, Bloomberg News reported. It’s as if Asia’s fourth-largest economy is being squeezed with a nutcracker, with China catching up to Korea and overtaking it in some sectors, while Japan is regaining its competitiveness as the economy recovers and it comes up with innovative technologies, said Yung Chung, Seoul-based managing director of AlixPartners LLP.

Top cocoa producer Ivory Coast has averted defaults on export contracts this season by letting multinational commodities companies buy at-risk contracts from local exporters, exporters and sources at the cocoa regulator said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. During the 2017/18 and 2016/17 growing seasons, exporters defaulted on nearly 500,00 tonnes of cocoa contracts they had bought in advance of the season as world market prices fell and exporters were unable to honour commitments to suppliers.