Headlines

Sears Canada recently announced that it's closing all stores and eliminating thousands of jobs in Mississauga and beyond. This might be sad news for employees and anyone who feels some nostalgia thinking about Sears catalogues, but it also means that sales are coming. Prior to the court ruling, Sears said it would proceed with liquidation sales at retail locations on October 19 and continue for 10 to 14 weeks, Insauga reported.

Europe’s largest tour operator TUI is putting on extra flights to make up for capacity lost after this month’s collapse of Monarch, TUI’s UK and Ireland boss said on Wednesday. Shares of leading travel companies and airlines rose after Monarch went bust, with investors betting that intense competition in the sector could ease, Reuters reported. At an event to announce TUI’s rebranding of its UK operation to TUI UK from Thomson, the company’s UK and Ireland Managing Director Nick Longman said it had already laid on extra flights and is looking to add more.

Britain's Financial Conduct Authority has agreed to allow a confidential report on the Royal Bank of Scotland's treatment of struggling companies to be scrutinised by a barrister, MPs said on Tuesday. In a letter to MPs , Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the FCA, agreed to allow a barrister to check a summary of the report against its full contents, which the regulatory agency says was never meant to be public, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

China has taken “baby steps” toward cutting leverage as lending from banks slows, but progress has been uneven as borrowing by households and the government has risen, according to S&P Global Ratings. Authorities are adopting both tight and loose policies to try to reduce the country’s dependency on debt without causing a hard landing, analysts led by Christopher Lee wrote in a note dated Oct. 16. S&P last month cut China’s sovereign rating for the first time since 1999, saying it didn’t believe enough was being done to contain credit growth, Bloomberg News reported.

Relations between the countries with the European Union’s strongest economy and its most troubled one have been testy at times, but the bond has held. Yet just when it needs strengthening, the link between Germany and Greece may be at risk of fraying further, the International New York Times reported in a commentary. During Greece’s debt crisis, angry exchanges in the Greek and German news media and populist rhetoric on both sides encouraged national stereotyping, affecting each country’s domestic politics and relations between them.

Can financial turmoil in China play havoc with the rest of the world? It has already happened. On the first trading day of 2016, China’s central bank sent shockwaves around the world by sharply lowering the value of the yuan. The decline in the currency itself, which came after the bursting of a stock market bubble, was not the biggest concern, The Wall Street Journal reported. Rather it was a sudden loss of confidence in China’s growth story that reverberated around the world.

Almost a decade after the Irish economy was crippled by a banking catastrophe, the country is reopening its arms to banks to take advantage of shifts in Europe’s finance industry triggered by Brexit, The Wall Street Journal reported. Take Bank of America Corp. Once Ireland’s biggest bank by assets, the U.S. lender shifted billions of dollars’ worth of derivatives out of Dublin to London following the financial crisis.

Germany’s Lufthansa and British budget airline easyJet are two of seven companies that have bid for Alitalia on Monday but the process to rescue Italy’s ailing flag carrier is likely to drag out until late next year, Reuters reported. Alitalia, which has made a profit only a few times in its 70-year history, was put under special administration earlier this year after staff rejected a plan to cut jobs and salaries. Seven envelopes were delivered by a deadline to submit binding offers for parts or all of the airline on Monday, Alitalia said in a statement, but gave no further details.

The owner of failed British airline Monarch should, in principle, foot some of the bill for a massive repatriation effort co-ordinated by the country’s aviation authority, British transport minister Chris Grayling said on Monday. Monarch collapsed two weeks ago, wrecking the holiday plans of hundreds of thousands of Britons, a year after owner Greybull Capital secured a bailout for the struggling airline, Reuters reported.

China Development Bank plans to sign a document signaling support for the restructuring plan of debt-laden Brazilian phone carrier Oi SA, said two people close to the discussions. The bank may sign the agreement with Oi as soon as Tuesday, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private negotiations, Bloomberg News reported. The Chinese bank has been discussing in court how to restructure $1.2 billion in financing it provided to Oi just six months before the operator filed for the largest judicial recovery in Latin America’s history.