Headlines

EU finance ministers will on Monday discuss proposals to give the eurozone more powerful tools to prevent financial crises, the Financial Times reported. While politicians including France’s President Emmanuel Macron have floated grand ideas such as the appointment of a euro area finance minister, or the creation of a fully fledged European Monetary Fund, months of technical negotiations leading up to Monday’s so-called eurogroup meeting have focused on more low-key, politically feasible improvements to the currency union’s plumbing.

India’s massive pile of bad business debt has kept asset-reconstruction companies busy in recent years. But as signs emerge that the supply of such assets may be leveling off, the nation’s largest buyer of bad loans is considering a rare move to start purchasing soured consumer debt, Bloomberg News reported. Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction Co. is setting up a team for that and seeks to start purchases in 2019, Chief Executive Officer Raj Kumar Bansal said in an interview. “Corporate non-performing assets have plateaued,” Bansal said.

On the eve of the inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as Mexico’s next president, his administration is looking to restructure $6bn worth of bonds backing the partly completed Mexico City airport whose future was put in doubt in October, the Financial Times reported. “We will begin negotiations to seek a fair treatment with investors and to respect their rights as bondholders,” said an aide to Arturo Herrera, incoming deputy finance minister. A plan could be announced as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.

The chairwoman and chief executive have resigned, the head of finance has been fired, while the company’s dividend has been slashed and its debt downgraded to junk, the Financial Times reported. It has been a grim few months for Dia Group, the Spanish supermarket chain. The bad news has crushed the group’s shares, which have this year plummeted more than 80 per cent to under €0.70, and pushed down the company’s long-term debt to around half its face value.

India’s economy grew at a much slower pace than economists expected last quarter, giving the central bank more reason to keep interest rates unchanged this week, Bloomberg News reported. After breaking through the 8 percent mark in the quarter through June, growth eased to 7.1 percent in the three months through September -- lower than almost all the estimates in a Bloomberg survey -- as back-to-back rate hikes in June and August, a funding squeeze and subdued growth in farming put a brake on the world’s fastest-expanding economy.

South Africa’s government is prioritizing regaining an investment grade rating on its debt as part of its plans to revive a stagnant economy, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni said. Moody’s Investors Service is the only one of the three major credit-rating companies that still assesses South Africa’s debt at investment grade, Bloomberg News reported. S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings Ltd. cut their ratings to junk during former President Jacob Zuma’s tenure which was characterized by political uncertainty due to multiple cabinet reshuffles and corruption scandals.

Europe’s only commercial maker of military drones, Italy-based Piaggio Aerospace, has lost its sole customer after going into bankruptcy in a setback for Italian ambitions to challenge U.S. and Israeli firms in a fast growing industry, Reuters reported. Piaggio, a unit of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund Mubadala, competes with firms such as U.S. General Atomic, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin as well as Israel’s Elbit Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI).

Conglomerate Ahmad Hamad Algosaibi and Brothers (AHAB) has become the first company to file for a settlement under Saudi Arabia’s new bankruptcy law, seeking to resolve the kingdom’s longest-running and largest debt dispute, Reuters reported. The company hopes the move will help to bring a conclusion to creditor talks that have rumbled on since AHAB and Saad Group defaulted on about $22 billion of debt in 2009. The law, which came into effect in August 2018, is the latest of the kingdom’s reforms aimed at attracting foreign investment and reducing the economy’s dependence on oil.

Greece has quietly postponed a landmark bond sale after the prolonged sell-off in Italy’s bond market pushed up its cost of raising new debt, the Financial Times reported. The nation’s leftwing Syriza government had hoped to issue a benchmark 10-year bond within a few weeks of the country’s exit from its €86bn third bailout in August, as a signal to investors that Greece had returned to normalcy.

Investors in the five largest UK property funds have more than £4bn of exposure to the country’s struggling stores and shopping centres, which analysts say could shed as much as 20 per cent of their value by the end of 2019, the Financial Times reported. Retail property, including shopping centres, retail parks and high streets, makes up a significant proportion of some of the largest direct property funds that are open to individual, or retail, investors. Managers say many of these assets are now sliding in value amid a deepening crisis in the sector.