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Russia laid the groundwork for an operation that will reduce some of its closest and biggest dollar bond payments before the end of the year, Bloomberg News reported. The Finance Ministry has permission to swap up to $4 billion of debt maturing in 2018, 2028 and 2030 into new notes, according to a decree published on the government’s website on Tuesday. The price of the exchange won’t exceed the current market value, according to the decree. The swap aims to lower Russia’s debt load and servicing costs and reduce the volume of payments owed before 2019, the decree said.

Europe’s top official in charge of winding down failed banks has urged the EU to tighten restrictions on when governments can pump money into stricken lenders, in response to recent cases in Italy where senior bondholders were spared losses. Elke König, the head of the eurozone’s Single Resolution Board, told the Financial Times in an interview that state aid guidelines adopted by the European Commission in 2013 were in effect out of date, as the EU has since taken steps to make sure failed banks can be wound down without sparking a broader crisis, the Financial Times reported.

The UK’s most senior supervisor of banks and insurers has given his starkest warning to date over the risks the financial system faces from a cliff-edge Brexit without a transition period, the Financial Times reported. Sam Woods, a deputy governor of the Bank of England, said an audit of worst-case contingency plans by banks and insurers had underlined fears of added cost and complexity for business and supervisors, should companies lose their EU “passport” with no time to adjust to a new regime.

Nearly six months after his turbulent elevation to run India’s biggest conglomerate, Natarajan Chandrasekaran is assembling a team of dealmakers to refocus some of the group’s biggest businesses, expand its financial services and consumer businesses and sell or merge dozens of smaller units, according to interviews with senior executives.

When a small Italian bank was looking to buy a portfolio of nonperforming loans last year, its due diligence turned up an unpleasant surprise: Virtually all the documentation for the 40,000 loans was on paper. With each loan dossier consisting of about 1,000 pages, “we were talking about several 18-wheelers full of paper,” recalls Andrea Clamer, head of Banca Ifis IF 0.96% SpA’s bad-loans unit. So he knocked the price down by 10%, paying less than 5% of the loans’ €1 billion face value, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Nigeria's Union Bank has sufficient cover for its 3.9 billion naira ($10.69 million) loan to telecoms group 9mobile and will focus on expanding lending to agricultural and real estate businesses, its chief executive, Emeka Emuwa, said on Monday. Lenders have agreed to extend a $1.2 billion loan which mobile operator 9mobile, formerly known as Etisalat Nigeria, took out four years ago but struggled to repay due to a currency crisis and a recession in Nigeria, Reuters reported.

Delivering yet another jolt to Russia’s central bank, last month brought a new surprise after an inflationary shock in June, Bloomberg News reported. The unexpected reading in the consumer-price index pushed it below the Bank of Russia’s target of 4 percent months ahead of a year-end deadline, as a surge in food costs fizzled out. But when it comes to the direction of policy, the turnaround may not be much of a game changer after the central bank put its easing cycle on pause in July following three straight cuts.

European investment-grade bonds will become a world of pain if volatility rises from record lows because investors aren’t being compensated for liquidity, default and downgrade risks, Bloomberg News reported. On top of those dangers, high debt burdens and aggressive valuations will conspire to crimp capital gains on European bonds this late in the global credit cycle. That’s the warning from U.S. Treasury bond bull Steven Major, who’s now sounding an alarm on credit markets in Europe.

Greece is finally growing again. But it has been arguably the eurozone’s greatest failure. Catapulted into a debt crisis with a 15 per cent government spending deficit in 2009, the country suffered eight years of economic contraction, the Financial Times reported. Unemployment is still 23 per cent, youth unemployment 45 per cent. Greece’s “Great Depression” has been as deep as that of the US in the early 1930s, but twice as long. Can Europe learn from the country’s painful experience? A first lesson is to reform at the top of the cycle.

Industrial output in Germany contracted by 1.1 per cent in June compared to May – its biggest drop of the year and defying expectations of growth in a weak end to the quarter for a sector which accounts for nearly a third of the country’s economy. Official figures from Destatis show factory output also fell back on a year on year measure from 5 per cent to 2.4 per cent growth in June, the Financial Times reported. An average forecast from analysts pointed to a 3.7 per cent climb.