Headlines

Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. The looming insolvency of once-mighty commodities trader Noble Group Ltd. is an overdue reckoning for a company that has long sailed close to the wind, a Bloomberg View reported. More than that, though, it’s a black mark against the city-state where it’s been listed since 1997: Singapore. Noble has spent the past year squirming through an attempted restructuring to keep it from bankruptcy, hampered by its money-losing operating business and years of squandered trust.

Insolvencies filed by Canadian consumers jumped by the most in two years amid signs recent interest rate increases are filtering through to the economy, Bloomberg News reported. Insolvencies climbed to 11,641 in October, an increase of 9.2 percent from a year earlier, according to a report from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy Canada. Insolvencies surged 16 percent from September, and are 1.5 percent higher than 2017 on a year-to-date basis.

Flows to India’s money funds hit a three-month high in November as calm returned to the credit market recently roiled by a rare debt default, Bloomberg News reported. Investors poured a net 1.4 trillion rupees ($20 billion) into liquid plans in November, industry data show. The inflow is the highest since August, a month before the funds suffered the worst outflows since at least 2007 amid defaults at the IL&FS Group. “Worries after that credit event are abating and people are returning to money markets,” N.S.

Not long ago, EU leaders were talking about a grand bargain to reform their currency union. It isn’t happening. Europe’s finance ministers have just approved a package of reforms to strengthen the monetary union, a Bloomberg View reported. Their plan falls far short of what’s needed. The new proposals aren’t worthless — any steps to better equip the euro zone to deal with the next financial crisis are welcome. But they conspicuously fail to address the system’s most important weaknesses: deposit insurance and fiscal policy.

South Africa’s financial regulator is investigating seven trading accounts that sold Steinhoff International Holdings NV shares in the weeks leading up to the global retailer’s disclosure of accounting irregularities and subsequent share-price collapse a year ago, Bloomberg News reported. The accounts belong to individuals, trusts and corporate entities and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority is looking for evidence of insider trading, it said in a statement Friday. The probe is close to completion.

Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. should consider selling two coal-fired plants that rank among the world’s biggest to repair the state-owned utility’s finances, according to the head of South Africa’s biggest bank by market value, Bloomberg News reported. The supplier of almost all of South Africa’s power is being battered by declining sales, high fixed costs, surging debt and unplanned outages that are holding back economic growth. Its two new power plants, Medupi and Kusile, are still unfinished after a decade of construction.

Italy’s government will extend to the end of June the deadline for Alitalia to repay a 900 million euro ($1 billion) bridge loan, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Friday. The current deadline is Dec. 15, but Di Maio said the government would change the date in a decree to be approved on Monday, Reuters reported. The loan was given to the airline, which is under special administration and is being run by state commissioners, to keep it afloat until it can restructure and find partners.

Troubled low-cost African carrier Fastjet Plc warned on Friday it may have to go into administration, shut shop or sell itself as it had only enough cash to keep it in business for another seven days, Reuters reported. The airline, which had a cash balance of $6.8 million as of Thursday, said it might have to formally hire insolvency advisers for the process if its cash balance does not improve.

Italy has bought back €3.2bn of its short-dated debt in a move that was financed by tapping an existing three-year bond, the Financial Times reported. The Italian Treasury said in a statement that the rationale for the move was “to improve the liquidity and the efficiency of the secondary market for government securities”. The €3.2bn of new three-year debt was sold via syndication on Thursday by re-opening the October 2021 bond, which carries a 2.3 per cent coupon. It is Italy’s first syndicated deal since January, and its last debt sale of this year.

Monarch Airlines’ collapse last year put at risk £30m of Manchester Airports Group’s earnings, as it hurried to find airlines to fill slots that had brought 2m passengers a year through the UK’s third-busiest airport, the Financial Times reported. MAG has since replaced — or “backfilled” — the 2m passenger capacity previously used by Monarch, chief executive Charlie Cornish said on Thursday. But filling the slots took time, Mr Cornish said, and left the group facing a tricky trading situation.