Headlines

Budget carrier SpiceJet is facing fresh insolvency proceedings, this time from Indonesia’s PT BBN Airlines over unpaid lease rentals totalling $5.94 million, Mint.com reported. The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), Delhi bench, heard the case on Friday but has yet to issue a notice after SpiceJet sought time to respond. The next hearing has been scheduled for 21 April. PT BBN Airlines claims SpiceJet leased three Boeing aircraft under specific agreements, took possession on 9 June 2024, and used them for operations.

Ethiopia has reached a deal with its official creditors to restructure $8.4 billion of international debt, a key milestone in the nation’s efforts to overhaul its loans and boost growth, Bloomberg News reported. The agreement with bilateral lenders under the G20 Common Framework, backed by an International Monetary Fund program, will slash debt service by $2.5 billion through 2028, its finance ministry said on Friday, without giving details of the terms. The deal will allow the country to spend more on “critical public investments,” the ministry said in a statement.

Japan’s consumer inflation slowed slightly in February due to energy subsidies but continued trending up amid a record spike in rice prices and indications of strong wage growth, keeping interest-rate hike expectations intact, the Wall Street Journal reported. Overall consumer prices rose 3.7% in February from a year earlier, compared with the 4.0% growth seen in January, government data showed Friday. Energy prices rose 6.9% on the year, much slower than the 10.8% increase seen the previous month, as the government reintroduced subsidies for electricity and gas bills.

Canadian consumers pared back their spending for a second straight month amid trade war uncertainty, only partially reversing a year-end boost in sales after a federal sales tax was paused, Bloomberg News reported. An advance estimate suggests receipts for retailers fell 0.4% in February, Statistics Canada said Friday. The declines follow a 2.6% spike in sales in December that coincided with the start of the break in sales taxes on some items. Still, the first back-to-back decreases since mid-2023 may point to mounting pressures on consumption from concerns about the US-Canada tariff war.

The European Union is delaying the retaliatory tariffs it announced after the United States imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports earlier this month, CNN.com reported. The countermeasures, which include higher tariffs on American whiskey, were set to take effect starting April 1 and follow a phased approach. Instead, they will take effect all at once in mid-April, pending negotiations, the Commission announced on Thursday. In addition to whiskey, the first phase called for 50% tariffs on motorboats and motorcycles from the US.

The Bank of England has left itself the option to “skip” an interest rate cut later this year, economists have said, after policymakers voted to leave borrowing costs unchanged at 4.5 percent, The Telegraph reported. Andrew Bailey, the Governor, was among the eight members of the nine-strong Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to vote to keep rates on hold, with only one member - Swati Dhingra - voting to cut to 4.25pc.

Buried in China’s latest government budget were some numbers that add up to an alarming trend. Tax revenue is dropping, the New York Times reported. The decline means that China’s national government has less money to address the country’s serious economic challenges, including a housing market crash and the near bankruptcy of hundreds of local governments. Weak tax revenue also puts China’s leaders in a box as they square off with President Trump, who has imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more to come.

Turkey’s central bank raised one of its key interest rates in a surprise meeting on Thursday, the latest move by authorities to reverse a decline in the lira, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary authority hiked the overnight lending rate by two percentage points to 46%, while keeping the main gauge of one-week repo unchanged. The lira, which tumbled 3.2% a day earlier, rose briefly after the news and was trading 0.1% lower at 37.9520 per dollar at 7:22 p.m.

South Korean authorities are ramping up efforts to regulate the crypto market, focusing on exchanges believed to be operating without proper licensing, CoinMarketCap.com reported. The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the Financial Services Commission is investigating several platforms, including KuCoin, BitMEX, CoinW, Bitunix, and KCEX, for allegedly providing services to South Korean users without registering as Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs).

Dubai is weighing significant changes to its rules governing money managers to further burnish the city’s credentials as an emerging hub for hedge funds, Bloomberg News reported. The Dubai Financial Services Authority is undergoing a sweeping review of its slate of regulations with the goal of removing unnecessary regulatory burden and lowering barriers to entry, according to a spokesperson for the agency. The DFSA regulates the Dubai International Financial Centre, a hub for many fund managers. Already, the agency has proposed cutting minimum capital thresholds for some money managers.