Headlines

Gloucestershire Constabulary finance chiefs have dismissed fears they could go bust '"like Birmingham City Council" amid concerns over funding, BBC.com reported. The force said that it would not face bankruptcy as concerns grew over plans for a stark rise in debt, a recruitment freeze and a "blip" in officer leaving. According to a report by Peter Robinson, the Office for Police and Crime Commissioner's (OPCC) interim chief finance officer, the force needed to find cumulative budget savings of £7m next year, with an increase year on year.

Volkswagen AG’s truckmaking brand Scania plans to equip all its future electric trucks with Northvolt batteries, in a vote of confidence for the cash-strapped Swedish battery maker as it works to seal up a rescue package, Bloomberg News reported. “We are now shifting over. For the future, all of our currently sold battery electric vehicles will come with Northvolt cells,” Scania Chief Executive Officer Christian Levin said in a call with reporters on Monday. The volumes Northvolt is currently supplying to Scania are “satisfactory to us given the total market right now,” Levin said.

Azul SA’s shares jumped after the Brazilian airline inked an agreement with its bondholders, allowing a crucial deal to move forward with its lessors and parts suppliers that reduces the airline’s debt and boosts its cash position, Bloomberg News reported. The deal allows for existing creditors to provide as much as $500 million in new senior secured debt, with $150 million to be provided this week and $250 million by the end of the year, according to a regulatory filing Monday. Another $100 million could be unlocked at a later date, Azul said.

German landlord Adler Group SA is looking to refinance senior debt it took out as part of a restructuring earlier this year in an effort to lower its servicing costs, Bloomberg News reported. Adler is looking at a number of options to reduce the cost of its first lien debt, including using proceeds from asset sales to repay part of it. It has also approached investors to refinance some debt at a lower rate. Talks about Adler’s options are at preliminary stages and might not lead to a deal.

China's central bank launched a new lending tool on Monday to inject more liquidity into the market and support credit flow in the banking system ahead of the expiration of trillions of yuan in loans at the end of the year, Reuters reported. The People's Bank of China said in a statement it had activated the open market outright reverse repo operations facility to "maintain a reasonable abundance of liquidity in the banking system and further enrich the central bank's policy toolbox".

Investors are no longer betting Argentina is heading inevitably to default as President Javier Milei wins over bond markets with his plans to remake South America’s second-largest economy, Bloomberg News reported. The extra-yield investors demand to hold Argentine paper over similarly dated US Treasury yields closed below 10 percentage points, a level that traditionally signals distress, according to data from JPMorgan Chase & Co. The spread is at its lowest levels since August 2019, when former President Mauricio Macri was in office.

Volkswagen plans to shut at least three factories in Germany, lay off tens of thousands of staff and shrink its remaining plants in Europe's biggest economy as it plots a deeper-than-expected overhaul, the company's works council head said on Monday, Reuters reported. Europe's biggest carmaker has been negotiating for weeks with unions over plans to revamp its business and cut costs, including considering plant closures on home soil for the first time, in a blow to Germany's industrial prowess.

Warnings over France’s financial situation grew on Friday when the Moody’s ratings agency issued a negative outlook for the country’s sovereign debt rating amid concerns about the nation’s rapidly rising debt and deficit, the New York Times reported. The outlook reflects what Moody’s said were heightened risks of political gridlock in France as Prime Minister Michel Barnier struggles to get a newly elected — and deeply divided — Parliament to pass an austerity budget. France has become one of the most financially troubled countries in Europe, with a ballooning debt and deficit.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the West Bank’s economy could collapse if Israel doesn’t preserve its banking relationship with Palestinian financial institutions in the territory it occupies, highlighting another potential source of instability as Israel also fights foes in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported. In a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yellen and several of her global counterparts urged the Israeli leader’s government to approve a waiver that would continue to allow Palestinian and Israeli banks to correspond.

As recently as 2010, few industries were as lawless, and yet as central to the global economy, as China’s production of rare earth metals, the New York Times reported. Consignments of rare earths frequently changed hands for sacks of Chinese currency: The rule of thumb was that a cubic foot of tightly packed 100-renminbi bills was worth $350,000. At a warehouse in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, acid was used illegally to extract rare earths, and the residue, faintly radioactive, was dumped into the municipal sewage.