Headlines

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former cricket captain and newly elected prime minister, is on a sticky wicket. His victory in last week’s polls was secured in part on a pledge to ramp up spending on public services. Yet the coffers are empty and a balance of payments crisis looms, the Financial Times reported. Instead of the “Islamic welfare state” he hoped to create, his aides are forced to ponder the prospect of an IMF deal. Even that safety net may not be at hand.

House of Fraser is fighting for its survival after the Hong Kong-listed company that also owns toy shop Hamleys abandoned plans to rescue one of the UK’s oldest and more storied retail chains, the Financial Times reported. C.banner International, a Chinese fashion group, said on Wednesday it was “impracticable and inadvisable” to proceed with acquiring a controlling stake in the department store, which would have given the company a £70m lifeline, because of a collapse of its own share price over the past month.

Japanese 10-year bond yields had their biggest one-day jump in two years on Wednesday as traders wasted no time in testing the Bank of Japan’s resolve to loosen its target range for the debt benchmark, the Financial Times reported. The yield on the benchmark 10-year JGB jumped 6 basis points to 0.12 per cent, a day after the BoJ tweaked its vast quantitative easing programme. The central bank doubled the level it will permit 10-year yields to climb from 0.1 to 0.2 per cent.

Heavy debt exposure to Ivory Coast’s largest domestic cocoa exporter, which has been ordered into liquidation, risks destabilizing the West African nation’s banking sector, bank officials said on Tuesday. A court on July 18 ordered the liquidation of the SAF-Cacao group of companies, which includes exporter CIPEXI and processor CHOCO-IVOIRE, over unpaid debts to the Ivorian marketing board, the Coffee and Cocoa Council, Reuters reported.

As the plunging lira weighs on Turkish borrowers, the nation’s banks are proposing a quicker way of resolving loans that turn sour, Bloomberg News reported. In what would be the first such codified rules, the Banks Association of Turkey, which represents non-Islamic lenders, drew up a framework of principles for restructuring loans that exceed 50 million lira ($10.2 million), according to a copy of the document obtained by Bloomberg News. TBB, as the industry group is known, declined to comment.

A slowing economy and a rumbling trade war are giving officials trying to tame China’s debt reason to be more selective about their targets, not to give up completely, Bloomberg News reported. Less than two years into the broad-based drive to contain credit growth, policy makers are now placing more emphasis on curbing debt at state firms and in parts of the property market. Meanwhile, the vise-grip that’s been causing contraction in the shadow banking sector and at local governments is being eased in the hope of preventing a sudden stop in the economy.

When the pressure intensified on Abraaj over allegations that it had mishandled investors’ funds, Arif Naqvi, the private equity group’s founder, handed over the reins of the company’s fund business to “drive the necessary operational and governance changes,” the Financial Times reported. The Dubai-based buyout house said the move would “ensure that the firm continues to perform at the highest levels”.

Recent optimism in China’s debt market will soon be put to the test, with investors able to demand early repayment for as much as 544.7 billion yuan ($80 billion) of debt by year-end, Bloomberg News reported. The amount of local bonds with put options that hit trigger points in the coming five months comes to almost 1.4 times the tally from January to July, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The International Monetary Fund has warned eurozone governments that they need to give Greece more long-term debt relief to stop the country from being locked out of financial markets as Athens prepares for life outside a bailout programme, the Financial Times reported. In a swipe at EU capitals that have pushed back at Greek demands for greater debt relief, the IMF has calculated that Greece’s long-term debt costs will be unsustainable in 20 years’ time because of the high budget surplus targets demanded by European creditors as part of Athens’ post-bailout conditions.  Wit

Concerns over a slowdown in the eurozone rose on Tuesday after official figures showed growth in the region hit its weakest rate in two years in the second quarter, the Financial Times reported. Gross domestic product expanded 0.3 per cent in the second quarter from the first, according to Eurostat, the eurozone’s statistics agency — a weaker figure than forecast and the lowest since the second quarter of 2016.