Headlines

The City of London likes nothing better than a dust-up between two alpha male financiers over large sums of money. Hence the excitement that surrounds the ugly stand-off between Guy Hands and Spencer Haber, whose US hedge fund is a big investor in one of the British private equity veteran’s most troubled punts. Last week, after months of macho posturing about the ownership of some disputed assets, Mr Hands finally backed away from a showdown with Mr Haber’s H/2 fund over the future of Four Seasons, one of Britain’s largest nursing home groups.

Noble Group Ltd., the embattled commodities trader, faces several significant deadlines as it wrestles with a $3.5 billion debt restructuring, Bloomberg News reported. Once Asia’s largest commodity trader, Noble’s decline since 2015 has been marked by losses, concern it won’t be able to pay its debt and accusations from long-time foe Iceberg Research that it inflated the value of some contracts. The next few weeks will be crucial, as Noble looks to push its debt restructuring through. One focus is Dec. 20.

The financial industries of Sweden and Denmark were quick to criticize the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s completed framework on Thursday, arguing it will hit Scandinavian lenders too hard, Bloomberg News reported. “The Basel standards will, if they are fully implemented in the EU and Sweden, have large negative effects for Swedish banks, their clients and the Swedish economy,” Hans Lindberg, the head of the Swedish Bankers’ Association, said in a statement on Thursday.

Sentiment in the Chinese bond market has worsened as investors digest the government’s latest message about reducing risk in the financial system, the Financial Times reported. After November’s treasury sell-off, corporate bond prices have fallen; the spread between five-year triple A-rated corporate paper and equivalent Ministry of Finance yields has widened to a three-year high. The sell-off has spread to riskier assets in the wake of the release of draft rules aimed at bringing order to China’s Rmb75tn ($11tn) universe of asset management products.

With the eurozone economy on a tear, European leaders have voiced renewed ambition for reforms to reinforce the foundations of monetary union, the Financial Times reported. The rationale is clear: to give the eurozone’s governance more legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens; and to make the bloc better equipped to withstand adversity next time a crisis hits. But there is no consensus on what reforms should look like. All attempts to articulate a plan run up against fundamental political differences that have dogged the single currency since its inception.

Year-end demand by European banks for dollar funding has been flagged as one reason for the euro’s weakness in recent days, the Financial Times reported. The euro has fallen from a high of $1.1960 on November 27 to $1.1785 yesterday — a fall of 1.5 per cent. The dip has pushed the year-to-date advance to 12.2 per cent, according to Reuters data. Ulrich Leuchtmann, strategist at Commerzbank, chalks up at least part of the fall to a disruption in the interbank currency lending market — a familiar annual pattern that has occurred over the past few years.

One of China's biggest state-run conglomerates has sued a Venezuelan counterpart in a U.S. court in a dispute over unpaid bills, a sign of Beijing's growing impatience with its socialist South American ally as it slides into bankruptcy, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. In the lawsuit filed Nov. 27 in a Houston federal court, a U.S. subsidiary of Sinopec sought more than $23 million in damages from Venezuela's state-run oil company, PDVSA.

A manager at the center of investigations into an accounting scandal at British Telecom’s Italian business has been awarded almost 1.8 million euros ($2.1 million) in damages for wrongful dismissal, three legal sources said on Wednesday. Gianluca Cimini was fired for disciplinary reasons last year, months before the phone company filed a criminal complaint accusing him of grave violations of corporate governance, Reuters reported. The accusations arose from its investigation of alleged accounting fraud that cost the firm 530 million pounds ($690 million).

The answer to cleaning up bad loans still weighing down Italian banks may lie in a controversial proposal that would allow lenders to sell their debt at deep discounts without being forced to hold more capital, Bloomberg News reported. European Parliament lawmaker Peter Simon, who’s leading the assembly’s work on updating prudential rules for the region’s banks, wants to make it easier to sell debt cheaply without having to adjust a calculation known as loss given default, which typically hurts banks’ capital ratios.

China’s main annual economic policy meeting is likely to set a slightly lower growth target for 2018, suggesting that deleveraging will be gradual and no "serious" property tightening measures are in the pipeline, Bloomberg News reported. That’s according to Wang Tao, head of China economic research at UBS Group AG in Hong Kong. She argues in a Dec. 5 note that policy makers won’t drop a numerical growth target altogether, though may set a range similar to this year’s at around 6.5 percent without repeating this year’s language that it should be higher if possible in practice.