Headlines

Bankruptcy cases surged in China last year, indicating growing economic stress as well as progress in the ruling Communist party’s efforts to use the country’s courts to deal with indebted “zombie” companies and reduce industrial overcapacity, the Financial Times reported. Chinese courts accepted 5,665 bankruptcy cases in 2016, an increase of 54 per cent from the year before, the country’s top court said on Friday. About 3,600 of those cases were resolved, with 85 per cent of the resolved cases resulting in liquidation.

Fix Europe’s bad debts and you can start fixing Europe. That is the bigger imperative as the European Central Bank gets set finally to push the Continent’s lenders to clean up their combined €1 trillion bad-debt pile, The Wall Street Journal reported. Across the EU, bad debts average more than 5% of total loans, according to the European Banking Authority, which is almost three times the level of the U.S. or Japan, according to World Bank data. In some countries, they threaten financial stability: Italy, with more than €200 billion of duff loans, is the well-known standout.

Bond markets may have been roiled by the prospect of Marine Le Pen as president of the eurozone’s second largest economy but the country’s households and businesses are taking it in their stride, the Financial Times reported. They’ve started the year in bouyant mood, reaping the benefits of a broader uptick in job creation and consumer spending seen across the eurozone in recent months.

Rolling back wages 10 per cent is one of five priorities to ensure Essar Steel Algoma is competitive after its restructuring ends, the company's president and chief executive officer says. The steelmaker, under Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act protection since the fall of 2015, wants its unionized workforce, represented by United Steelworkers of America Locals 2251 and 2724, to accept the wage cut so Essar's payroll is in line with its Canadian competitors, Saultstar reported.

Faced by the industrial relations equivalent of a perfect storm, Bus Éireann stopped short yesterday of proceeding immediately with some of the most controversial elements of a survival plan it says is essential to its future, the Irish Times reported. But the decision to go ahead with 55 other changes brought a swift – and probably inevitable – response. The National Bus and Rail Union and Siptu said they would begin an all-out strike if the changes are implemented as planned next Monday. Extreme positions have been on display at Bus Éireann for some time.

Eurozone businesses grew more optimistic about their prospects in February, as a measure of confidence among service providers rose to its highest level since before the global financial crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. The pickup in business sentiment is consistent with the results of other recent surveys, which suggest the eurozone economy has gained fresh momentum in early 2017, despite heightened uncertainty about future policies ahead of key elections across the currency area.

Europe’s growing political risks are reviving a moribund corner of the credit market. Trading in credit-default swaps tied to French, Italian and Dutch sovereign debt has surged this year as populist parties garner electoral support by bashing the euro and European Union, Bloomberg News reported. That’s stemmed a long-term slump in trading of contracts insuring European government debt that was spurred by tougher regulations in 2012.

Brazil’s government can’t waive Oi SA’s debt with a local regulator and state-run banks, the communications minister said, denying the phone carrier a lifeline that would have helped it pull out of the biggest bankruptcy in the country’s history, Bloomberg News reported. “The government can’t let go of resources, they are public resources, debt with the public administration," Science and Technology Minister Gilberto Kassab said Sunday in an interview in Barcelona, Spain. The debt with the regulator is Oi’s main problem with the government, said Kassab, who also oversees communications.

Average wages in China’s manufacturing sector have soared above those in countries such as Brazil and Mexico and are fast catching up with Greece and Portugal after a decade of breakneck growth that has seen Chinese pay packets treble, the Financial Times reported. Across China’s labour force as a whole, hourly incomes now exceed those in every major Latin American state apart from Chile, and are at around 70 per cent of the level in weaker eurozone countries, according to data from Euromonitor International, a research group.

Greece's era of austerity is over, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras claimed Friday, as he painted a positive picture of the reforms his government has agreed to take after the bailout program ends in 2018. Speaking in parliament, Tsipras described the deal reached Monday as an "exceptional success" and said it showed the country's creditors accepted Greece's insistence that it could no longer bear further budget austerity, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story.