Headlines

Lufthansa reinforced its position as Germany’s largest airline on Thursday by signing a 210 million euro ($249 million) deal to buy large parts of insolvent Air Berlin, Reuters reported. Lufthansa plans to use the Air Berlin assets to quickly expand its Eurowings budget business. News of the deal pushed Lufthansa shares up more than 3 percent to their highest level in nearly 17 years. Air Berlin, which has struggled to turn a profit over the last decade, filed for insolvency on Aug.

Italian banks are being backed by some investors to withstand tougher European Central Bank rules on bad-loan provisioning that sent their shares tumbling, Bloomberg News reported. A 6.9 percent drop in a gauge of the nation’s lenders in the six days through Tuesday was blown out of proportion, according to Ronald Petitjean, a Paris-based fund manager at LA Francaise Inflection Point. With the International Monetary Fund increasing its growth forecasts for Italy on Tuesday, a resilient economy will disprove any concerns about the health of the country’s banks, he says.

Britain’s consumer borrowing boom may be about to hit a wall. Major banks are now more wary about extending unsecured credit than any time since 2008, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. According to a Bank of England survey published Thursday, lenders are starting to see an increase in defaults and have tightened the criteria they set for borrowers, Bloomberg News reported. The change comes in the wake of multiple warnings from regulators that the pace of borrowing, with credit growth still running close to 10 percent a year, poses a risk to financial stability.

Ireland’s recovery from the crash that led to an international bailout has reached a symbolic turning point as the country’s “bad bank” pays off the final slice of the €30.2bn senior debt it borrowed to clean up the financial system, the Financial Times reported. Nama, the national asset management agency, has signalled it will redeem the final €500m of the government-guaranteed debt this month, three years ahead of the target set at the outset of its work in 2009.

Australia’s central bank has warned that household borrowing is a key risk to the country’s financial system as higher interest rates could see households struggle to repay their debt, the Financial Times reported. “Higher interest rates, or falls in income, could see some highly indebted households struggle to service their debt and so curtail their spending,” the RBA said in its latest Financial Stability Review. Low interest rates and weak wage growth have seen debt levels relative to income edge higher, the central bank said.

Brazilian phone carrier Oi SA submitted a plan on Wednesday to restructure its 65.4 billion-real ($21 billion) debt burden with a proposal to limit the debt-for-equity swap demanded by creditors to 25 percent of capital, Reuters reported. The plan was delivered to a Rio de Janeiro court and creditors of the largest-ever bankruptcy proceeding in Latin America will vote on it on Oct. 23. Oi proposes to inject up to 9 billion reais, of which 6 billion reais would come from a stock offering and the rest through the debt-for-equity swap.

Lufthansa is poised to agree a deal to buy assets from insolvent Air Berlin, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, ahead of a deadline on Thursday, Reuters reported. Germany’s largest airline is set to buy Air Berlin’s Niki leisure unit, its LG Walter regional airline and some additional short-haul aircraft, the source said on Wednesday. “The deal with Lufthansa is done, there is agreement,” the person said, adding that no contract had been signed yet.

Investors are gaining confidence that Venezuela will make its next big bond payments. Notes from the state oil company that mature in November climbed to 94.5 cents on the dollar Wednesday, a three-year high, while amortizing bonds due in 2020 rose to their highest price since they were issued last year, Bloomberg News reported. There’s a $985 million payment due Oct. 27 for the 2020 bonds, and $1.2 billion due Nov. 2 on the securities maturing next month.

When it comes to companies saddled with multibillion-dollar fines, Oi SA sits on a very short list. But the Brazil telecom giant stands out in the notorious club that includes Volkswagen AG, Odebrecht SA and BP Plc. The German carmaker and Odebrecht, a Brazilian builder, each got hit with mega fines after years-long schemes that swindled governments and consumers, Bloomberg News reported. Odebrecht’s misdeeds even helped tip Latin America’s largest nation into a two-year depression that reduced gross domestic product by almost 10 percent. And Oi’s sin? It didn’t fix phone booths fast enough.

Berlin has quickly rejected plans by Brussels to revive talks on a eurozone bank deposit guarantee scheme, in a sign of how hard it will be to win German backing for further steps to pool responsibility for the bloc’s financial system. The European Commission on Wednesday proposed compromises aimed at ending two years of deadlock over the plans for a European Deposit Insurance Scheme, or EDIS. The plans have strong support from Paris and southern Europe but are viewed with deep misgivings in Germany, the Financial Times reported.