Headlines

U.K. consumers maintained their appetite for debt in June as the Bank of England considers whether to raise interest rates for only the second time since 2007, Bloomberg News reported. Unsecured lending rose 8.8 percent from a year earlier, the same rate as in the previous two months, the U.K. central bank said on Monday. Consumers added 1.6 billion pounds ($2.1 billion) to their debts in June -- above the average of the previous six months. Credit cards are accounting for an increasing share of consumer credit, outpacing personal loans, overdrafts and car finance, the BOE said.

State-owned carrier Air India has sought 21.21 billion rupees ($309 million) of additional equity from the government for the fiscal year 2018-19 to make pending payments to its vendors, a source at the airline told Reuters on Monday. Air India owes about 18 billion rupees to its vendors, including lessors and banks that have demanded payment from the beleaguered airline, after the government's unsuccessful efforts to find a buyer for its 76 percent stake, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Delays to the planned sale of Toshiba's NuGen nuclear project in Britain have prompted a review of the roles of 60 direct employees, who are mainly based in Manchester, raising further doubts over its future, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The plant in Moorside, north-west England, was expected to provide around 7 percent of Britain's electricity when built, but has faced several setbacks after Toshiba's nuclear arm Westinghouse went bankrupt last year.

Vijay Mallya’s Force India Formula One team has been put into administration after a court hearing in London on Friday, deputy principal Bob Fernley said. “An administrator was appointed by the court for Force India F1 this evening,” he confirmed to Reuters. The team’s chief operating officer Otmar Szafnauer told reporters earlier that the team might have to enter some form of administration before it could emerge on a sounder financial footing, Reuters reported.

A court in Ivory Coast has ordered the liquidation of SAF-Cacao, the top exporter in the world-leading cocoa grower, over debts owed to the Coffee and Cocoa Council (CCC) marketing board, the company’s chief executive told Reuters. The court order was issued on July 18 and an administrator has already been named to manage the process, Ali Lakiss said by telephone from the company’s headquarters in the second port city of San Pedro, Reuters reported. “We are still fighting to survive,” he said.

The number of people in England and Wales filing for insolvency hit a more than six-year high in the second quarter, adding to conflicting economic signals for Bank of England officials as they consider whether to raise interest rates next week, Reuters reported. Seasonally adjusted data from the Insolvency Service showed 28,951 people registered as insolvent between April and June — up 27 percent on a year ago and the largest total since early 2012 when Britain last flirted with recession.

Greece is planning a return to the markets in a bid to regain its status as a “normal” country. If the government can announce by the end of the year its program for tapping the markets in 2019, and repeat this exercise each year for the following 12 months, the plan will have worked, an official familiar with the matter said. After losing more than a quarter of its economic output during the past decade, Europe’s most indebted country is now trying to stand on its own feet again, Bloomberg News reported.

Zambia, which Moody’s Investors Service cut further into junk this weekend, wants help to refinance its first Eurobond that matures in 2022, President Edgar Lungu said during a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Bloomberg News reported. “$750 million is almost due for repayment, and I think we would seek assistance in that respect,” he said in comments broadcast over state-owned TV on Saturday.

Steve Eisman, who predicted the collapse of subprime mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis, is betting that Turkey’s economic troubles will also be a drag on two major European banks, Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA and Italy’s UniCredit SpA, Bloomberg News reported. “Everybody likes me to call the next disaster," Eisman said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, before being asked about pockets of risk where he sees opportunities.

Dozens of senior executives at Ireland’s biggest bank have been poached by rivals expanding in Dublin because of Brexit, prompting its chief executive to warn that the country’s stringent pay cap makes it hard to keep them, the Financial Times reported. Bernard Byrne, head of Allied Irish Banks, told the Financial Times that a “mid-teens” percentage of its 200 most senior managers have left since its privatisation last year, many hired by companies that are bulking up in Ireland ahead of Brexit, a list that includes Bank of America, Barclays and Citigroup.