Headlines

This spring, France will vote in a presidential election that has raised questions over the country’s continued use of the euro, The Wall Street Journal reported. National Front candidate Marine Le Pen has said she would pull her country, one of the European Union’s founding nations, out of the common currency. That has sent yields on French bonds climbing to their highest level against German debt since 2012. It has also hit the bonds of weaker European economies as questions resurface over the euro project. But for now, the currency itself appears relatively unmoved by the threat.

Investors just can’t get enough of Germany’s short-dated debt. The yield on Germany’s two-year bond has fallen to another record negative low this morning as bondholders snap up German assets amid escalating fears about the EU’s political stability, the Financial Times reported. Dubbed one of the “most sought after assets in financial markets“, the price on Germany’s two-year “schatz” bond has been pushed to an all-time high this week, driving yields head-long towards the minus 1 per cent mark.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde signalled that Greek debt restructuring can wait and the country should focus on overhauling its economy for the duration of its latest bailout, which expires in 2018, the Irish Times reported on a Bloomberg News story. Speaking in a German television interview after meeting Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, Ms Lagarde said “the volume of restructuring will clearly depend on how much reform, how much progress, how strong the Greek economy is” when the aid programme ends.

If Marine Le Pen has her way, the French will soon pay for their baguettes with francs, not euros, The New Zealand Herald reported on an Associated Press story. The presidential candidate from the anti-EU, anti-immigration National Front party is all about national sovereignty and independence. She wants France to take control of its money, subject to a referendum that would lead France out of the European Union and its shared currency. But how would France pull off a euro exit, or "Frexit"? No country has left the euro since its creation in 1999.

A round of job cuts has been made at O2 to strengthen the British mobile network’s performance, as parent company Telefónica continues to weigh options for the business. About 5 per cent of the UK network’s 6,500 workforce left the company in the fourth quarter, triggering a restructuring charge of €38m, the Financial Times reported. O2’s operating income for the quarter rose 4 per cent to £324m, excluding the charge. The full-year figure was 1.7 per cent higher at £1.4bn.

Germany has posted its highest budget surplus since reunification in 1991, inviting fresh scrutiny over whether the eurozone’s largest economy should do more to increase spending and redress global economic imbalances, the Financial Times reported. Germany’s statistical office on Thursday reported the country was in the black by €23.7bn last year, with local, state and central government coffers benefiting from record-low unemployment and ultra-cheap debt finance stemming from the European Central Bank’s mass purchases of sovereign bonds.

Liquidators have recovered a further $35,000 from clients who go more money out than they put into an alleged Ponzi scheme. A Christchurch forex firm, which traded as BlackfortFX, has been in receivership since May 2015 after the Financial Markets Authority froze its assets and it was put into liquidation shortly after, The New Zealand Herald reported. Liquidators say the company owes about 1110 clients about $7 million and its sole director, Jimmie Kevin McNicholl, has been charged with obtaining by deception Serious Fraud Office.

Three years after the shutdown of Wabush Mines by Cliffs Natural Resources, former workers and retirees are looking to a Quebec court to help them recover some of what they lost, CBC News reported. "We're all in this together now," said Rita Pynn, a retiree and member of the Wabush pension committee. "We've got to fight for what we worked for and what we feel Cliffs robbed us of." The workers lost medical benefits when the mine went into creditor protection. The company also left the workers' pension plan underfunded by more than $45 million.

Brazilian homebuilder PDG Realty SA said it was seeking protection from creditors by filing on Wednesday to restructure its debt in court, the country's second publicly listed builder to do so in less than six months, Reuters reported. PDG's gross debt was 5.4 billion reais ($1.75 billion) at the end of September, according to a quarterly earnings report. The company had 235 million reais of cash on hand at the time.

Grupo BTG Pactual, the Brazilian lender that slashed its workforce in 2016 and sold off assets to survive a liquidity crisis, is investing in Chile with plans to start lending, Bloomberg News reported. Rodrigo Oyarzo joined BTG to head the new credit business, according to Juan Guillermo Aguero, BTG’s chief executive officer for Chile. The idea is to use the Sao Paulo-based company’s banking license in Chile, obtained in 2014, to provide more “strategic” loans to clients tied to mergers and capital-markets transactions, Aguero said.