Headlines

Businesses across the 19-country eurozone, and particularly in France, are increasingly upbeat and hiring more people despite big uncertainties — including France's high-stakes presidential election, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. A closely watched survey of some 5,000 companies indicates that business activity is growing overall at the fastest rate in over six years.

A new reorganization plan from Brazil's debt-laden phone carrier Oi SA boosted shares on Thursday, but analysts continued to focus on the need for fresh capital after a heavy fourth-quarter loss, Reuters reported. Changes to the plan revealed late on Wednesday would offer Oi's financial creditors 25 percent of its equity or convertible bonds to be called in three years, at which point they could own up to 38 percent of the company's shares.

South Korean state banks are preparing a fresh $2.6 billion bailout for floundering Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co Ltd (042660.KS), which has built up huge losses from offshore projects and risks missing debt repayments, Reuters reported. Without the infusion of funds, Daewoo is not expected to be able to redeem 940 billion won ($840.49 million) in corporate bonds maturing this year - starting with 440 billion won due in April, the country's financial regulator, the Financial Services Commission (FSC), said on Thursday.

“An indebted Africa cannot be a rising Africa,” Akinwumi Adesina, head of the African Development Bank, told a gathering of the region’s heads of state, senior ministers and leading financiers last year. That warning is acquiring greater weight as government debt burdens tick up in many African countries on the back of a rising dollar, low commodity prices, rapid borrowing during the low interest rate era and sliding currencies, the Financial Times reported. The problem is not unique to Africa.

A new specter is haunting China’s financial system: the negotiable certificate of deposit. An explosion in banks’ use of the bondlike loans, whose durations range from a month to a year, is testing Beijing’s resolve to cure the economy of its addiction to debt-fueled growth and investment booms, The Wall Street Journal reported.

A Portuguese bank has borrowed on the international debt market for the first time in more than a year, defying a boycott from BlackRock and Pimco, which are locked in a legal fight with the country’s authorities over losses incurred in 2015, the Financial Times reported. Caixa Geral de Depósitos’ €500m subordinated bond, which priced on Thursday at a coupon of 10.75 per cent, attracted more than €2bn of orders. CGD, which is state-owned, is the second lender this month to tap investor interest in higher-yielding, although riskier, bank bonds from the eurozone’s so-called periphery.

South Korea's KEPCO, the likeliest suitor for Toshiba Corp's troubled nuclear business, is holding off from making an approach because of question marks over the scale of damage at the unit and political uncertainty in both South Korea and the United States, people with direct knowledge of the matter say, Reuters reported. Japanese TV-to-rail conglomerate Toshiba has been battered by a $6.3 billion hit from overruns in the nuclear business and has widened a probe into governance failures at its U.S.-based unit, Westinghouse. It is now considering a sale.

Mozambique missed a $119 million payment due Tuesday on a loan Credit Suisse Group AG arranged, the second debt repayment the government failed to make in as many months, Bloomberg News reported. The $622 million facility was taken out by state-owned ProIndicus and was supposed to fund the purchase of boats and radar systems to protect the country’s Indian Ocean coastline, where companies including Italy’s Eni SpA and U.S.-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. have large offshore gas reserves. Credit Suisse on Tuesday declined to comment on its financing of Mozambique.

Slumping cocoa prices are testing to the limit top producer Ivory Coast’s efforts to ensure stability for farmers, heightening risks for the domestic economy and world markets, Bloomberg News reported. Authorities have warned they’ll have to cut payments to growers. That follows a wave of defaults by local exporters who’d bet on higher prices, costing the government more than $300 million and pushing cocoa futures even lower.

When the EU created a supervisor to police the eurozone’s biggest banks at the end of 2014, it was billed as vital to protect a financial system teetering from the sovereign debt crisis, the Financial Times reported. Two years on, the eurozone might be creeping back to health — but doubt still surrounds whether the new Frankfurt-based body, the Single Supervisory Mechanism, has done enough to tackle persistent failings in parts of the region’s banking sector. “In purely operational terms, they have had a good start,” said Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a think-tank.