Headlines

Brussels said it has received assurances from the Italian government that it will work to bring down the country’s high level of public debt, in the latest step by Rome to ease EU concerns about its spending plans, the Financial Times reported.

Germany’s trade surplus narrowed in July to its smallest level in more than four years, as exports slipped while imports jumped during a period of escalating trade tensions that has seen the EU targeted by US tariffs. The data from the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis), which showed the foreign trade balance dropped by €3.2bn to a €15.8bn surplus in calendar and seasonally-adjusted terms, is the latest indication of weakness in the export-driven economy of the eurozone’s powerhouse, the Financial Times reported. Germany has not run a smaller surplus since March 2014.

Suruga Bank Ltd.’s top executives resigned after an independent panel found that weak governance led to a loan scandal that has rocked the Japanese regional bank, Bloomberg News reported. Chairman Mitsuyoshi Okano, a member of the founding family and architect of the company’s aggressive lending strategy, stepped down after the panel said he bears the greatest responsibility for the debacle. President Akihiro Yoneyama was replaced by Michio Arikuni, the Shizuoka-based bank said in a statement Friday.

Investors may grow more cautious of buying money market funds after IL&FS Financial Services Ltd. defaulted on its short-term borrowings, according to the Indian unit of Moody’s Investors Service, Bloomberg News reported. IL&FS Financial Services couldn’t repay some of its commercial papers on due date, though the company later settled the debt on Aug. 31, an exchange filing showed on Thursday. The default is likely to drive risk aversion among investors who have been piling into the commercial paper market as rising bond yields make long-term debt unattractive.

Turnround specialist Melrose Industries, which swooped on GKN in an £8bn hostile takeover this year, swung to a loss in the first half but said it had found no financial “black holes” in its new acquisition, the Financial Times reported. The FTSE 100 group reported a statutory operating loss of £256m for the period to the end of June. This included £124m in costs for the GKN acquisition — on advisers and in taxes — as well as £128m in restructuring costs, plus inventory writedowns and hedging losses.

As the Turkish lira plumbs the lower depths and the president’s finance minister son-in-law tours European capitals seeking support, Turkey-watchers could be forgiven a sense of déjà vu, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. In 2001, the currency suffered a devastating devaluation after the then president threw a copy of the constitution at the prime minister in a row over a corruption probe. This summer’s sharp slide in the lira, following US president Donald Trump’s punitive steel and aluminium tariffs, was a similar conflagration waiting to happen.

Just in case you needed another sign that Germany’s factory sector hit a rough patch this summer: manufacturing orders in the eurozone’s largest economy posted a surprise dip in July, according to new data released on Thursday, the Financial Times reported. New orders in manufacturing fell 0.9 per cent in July from June, according to the Federal Statistics Office. The reading was substantially worse than the 1.8 per cent rise that was forecast by economists in a Reuters poll. The figure was also down 0.9 per cent on a year-on-year basis.

The UK’s financial-markets watchdog put accountants on notice that they must improve auditing of financial companies’ client assets, the Financial Times reported. Charles Randell, the chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority, said on Thursday that the regulator had spotted instances where an audit of client assets was “just not good enough”, adding to the disquiet among regulators about the quality of financial firms’ audits. “We continue to see Client Assets reports that are just not good enough,” Mr Randell said in a speech, according to prepared remarks.

The Canuelas Golf Club is spread out on 178 acres of pristine pampas grassland on the western outskirts of Buenos Aires. Inaugurated in 2014, the club plays host to the Latin American PGA Tour and is the pride and joy of its owner, the corporate titan Aldo Navilli. But the club has now drawn the attention of another set of investors as well: Creditors including ING, Rabobank and the World Bank’s International Finance arm.

Greek banks made further progress during this year's second quarter in reducing their exposure to doubtful and non-performing loans, central bank data showed on Thursday. So-called non-performing exposures (NPEs) are the biggest challenge facing the sector, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. At the end of June they had fallen by 4.1 percent from the first quarter to 88.6 billion euros (79.7 billion pounds) or 47.6 percent of banks' overall loan book compared with a target of 90.2 billion euros or 46.9 percent.