Headlines

Workers may finally be getting a bigger piece of the economic pie — at least in Europe. Just don’t ask why, or whether it will last. In the decade since the financial crisis, much of the global economy has recovered and is back on stable footing, the International New York Times reported. Companies are reporting record profits, unemployment levels are plummeting and overall global growth is back on track. Wages in most developed countries, however, have barely budged. The economic puzzle has ramifications for global political as well as financial stability.

Greece is scheduled to exit its marathon bailout this summer after hitting the tough fiscal targets set by its creditors. But the country has done so by raising taxes so high that they are strangling the small businesses that form the backbone of its economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. At the Dandy restaurant in downtown Athens, owner Charalampos Bonatsos said rising taxes have forced him to lay off half his staff and cut his remaining workers’ wages. He said he still struggles to cope with the last three years’ increases in corporate income tax, property tax and sales tax.

The maelstrom that hit global financial markets a decade ago is known in Japan as the Lehman Shock, after the bankruptcy of the American investment bank that caused it, The Economist reported. Japanese banks themselves escaped relatively unscathed, owing to defences built during the 1990s, when the country struggled with deflation and excessive debt. But they seem to have forgotten the lesson. Risk-taking is back. Squeezed at home by razor-thin margins and negative interest rates, both major and regional banks have been on a spree abroad.

Steinhoff International Holdings NV has replaced Dirk Schreiber on the boards of two key units as the embattled retailer seeks to bolster independent oversight. The owner of Conforama in France and Mattress Firm in the U.S. last week won support from a majority of creditors to restructure its 9.4 billion euros ($11 billion) of debt, a vital step toward its recovery from an accounting scandal, Bloomberg News reported.

The Republic of Congo's state-owned insurer paid its first claims in eight years after selling real estate and is planning more property disposals to help recapitalize the business, Bloomberg News reported. Assurances et Reassurances du Congo, which owes claimants 7 billion CFA francs ($12 million), stopped payments in 2010 after the company struggled to reconstitute files damaged in a civil war a decade earlier.

Deutsche Bank AG vowed to maintain its position in fixed-income trading after recording its weakest second quarter in that business since the global financial crisis, as Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing accelerates the lender’s turnaround effort, Bloomberg News reported. Income from buying and selling fixed-income securities slumped 17 percent from a year earlier to 1.37 billion euros ($1.6 billion), the lowest figure for the period since 2008, Germany’s largest bank said on Wednesday. The five largest U.S.

Amid rising rates, ballooning debt levels and widening spreads there’s one statistic that gives comfort to credit investors: default rates. Insulated by cheap money from the QE era and bolstered by cash on their balance sheets, it remains rare for companies in Europe and the U.S. to miss debt payments, Bloomberg News reported. Among higher-risk speculative-grade firms the default rate fell to 2.9 percent last quarter, and may drop further to 2.1 percent by year-end, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

Deloitte LLP is offering Italy’s builders a way to get billions of euros in unpaid bills from public works projects off their balance sheets -- selling them at a discount to hedge funds. Construction companies that say they incurred costs in excess of agreed terms of public infrastructure projects have to pursue the difference in what can be a lengthy legal process, Bloomberg News reported.

German business expectations declined for the eighth month in a row in July even as the current assessment brightened, amid persistent concerns over the Washington-led trade battle, according to new data released on Wednesday. The Ifo Institute’s gauge of business expectations in the eurozone’s largest economy slipped to 98.2 in July from 98.5 in the previous month, the Financial Times reported. It ended last year at 102.7. Germany has a large, open economy with a big factory sector, meaning headwinds to global trade have an outsize effect on the country.

Banco Santander reported a 3 per cent fall in second-quarter net earnings, hit by €300m in integration costs from the takeover of troubled lender Banco Popular and a strong euro, the Financial Times reported. The eurozone’s largest bank by market capitalisation said total net profits, including the Popular charge, slipped to €1.698bn for the three months to June, down from €1.75bn in 2017. Analysts polled by Bloomberg had expected net earnings of €1.67bn for the quarter.