Headlines

Chinese property tycoon Wang Jianlin has embarked on a big asset reshuffling within his empire to reduce the leverage of Dalian Wanda’s listed arm as regulators increase the pressure on acquisitive dealmakers to cut debt, the Financial Times reported. Hong Kong-listed Wanda Hotel Development announced late on Wednesday it would buy nearly $1.1bn of assets from Wanda’s theme park and hotel management units.

Credit Suisse is banning its traders from dealing with a batch of Venezuelan bonds, fearing any potential reputational fallout from being seen to support the increasingly autocratic government of Nicolás Maduro, the Financial Times reported. Goldman Sachs was earlier this year lambasted by the country’s opposition for its asset management arm’s purchase of $2.8bn worth of Venezuelan bonds issued by the state oil company, PDVSA, which opposition members said amounted to a financial lifeline for the authorities.

Denmark registered a surge in inflation in July, driven by a sharp rise in the cost of food, drink, restaurants and hotels, pushing the country’s consumer price index above its eurozone’s peers, the Financial Times reported. The leap from 0.4 per cent to 1.5 per cent in year-on-year inflation makes this the highest rate since December 2012 in a country where price rises have long been subdued with the help of its currency peg. Denmark’s central bank targets inflation at close to but below 2 per cent.

Oi SA posted a wider-than-expected second-quarter loss as the Brazilian phone carrier was forced to close currency-hedging positions because of its protracted bankruptcy protection case, Reuters reported. Oi lost a net 3.303 billion reais ($1 billion) last quarter, about 16 times the size of the first quarter's 200 million-real shortfall, according to a securities filing on Wednesday. The loss was much more than an average consensus estimate of 332.8 million reais compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Predicting when Venezuela will finally default has been a decade-long parlor game for bond buyers, but recent events add urgency to the exercise, Bloomberg News reported. After years of mismanagement, the country appears closer and closer to running out of money. Adding to investors’ concern is the increasingly anti-democratic turn of President Nicolas Maduro, whose move to rewrite the constitution and strip power from congress has been met with U.S. sanctions.

For China’s ruling Communist party, its foreign exchange reserves are a symbol of national strength and are a crucial buffer against economic shocks. So the alarming announcement that forex reserves had fallen below $3tn in January marked a shift in political faultlines that is only being felt this summer, the Financial Times reported. As more than $1tn left the country over the previous 18 months amid a flurry of large overseas acquisitions, a sense of crisis grew within the party. Technocrats in Beijing had already prepared the ground to take action.

Almost one in five German companies has had their bank trying to charge negative interest rates — meaning they would have to pay the lender for the privilege of keeping their money on deposit, the Financial Times reported. The findings of a survey by Ifo, the Munich-based think-tank, shows the widespread effect of the European Central Bank’s ultra-low interest rate policy on the corporate sector in Germany, the eurozone’s economic powerhouse.

Japanese auto supplier Takata Corp filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection on Wednesday in an effort to pause lawsuits against the company over faulty air bag inflators - more than a month after its U.S. unit filed for bankruptcy in the same court, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. In its filing with the U.S.

At least four individuals have filed whistleblower complaints with Canadian securities regulators alleging fraud at a multibillion-dollar investment firm and its publicly traded lending arm, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Catalyst Capital Group Inc., one of Canada’s largest private-equity firms, is accused in the complaints of artificially inflating the value of some of its assets and deceiving borrowers about the terms of loans it made, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Frank Asbeck, founder and former CEO of SolarWorld, has teamed up with Qatar to buy two of the insolvent panel maker's factories, sources familiar with the matter said. Qatar was a shareholder in SolarWorld with a stake of 29 percent before its collapse, while Asbeck held 21 percent, Reuters reported. The plants, located in the German states of Saxony and Thuringia, will be taken over by a new investment vehicle called SolarWorld Industries GmbH, which counts Asbeck and the Qatar Foundation as its owners, the sources told Reuters on Tuesday.