Headlines

Russian state development bank VEB has solved its problems with liquidity for this year, the bank's Chairman Sergei Gorkov told President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said on its web-site on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said earlier that VEB which has lent heavily to loss-making projects would receive 150 billion roubles ($2.3 billion) from the budget in 2017, the same as in 2016. Read more. (Subscription required.)

After more than a year of gridlock, the upper house of India’s parliament approved a contentious overhaul of the country’s convoluted tax system, an important step in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign to modernize Asia’s No. 3 economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Lawmakers voted Wednesday to replace India’s jumble of federal, state and interstate sales taxes with a nationwide goods-and-services tax, or GST. Parliament’s lower house, where Mr.

In the three and a half years since he won the Japanese prime minister’s office on a pledge to rekindle economic growth, Shinzo Abe has tried many tactics to coax the economy into expanding, the International New York Times reported. He persuaded the central bank to flood the country with cheap money. He sanctioned a sharp fall in the value of the yen, a boon for big exporters like Toyota and Panasonic. And he increased government spending, pouring cash into areas as varied as day care and defense. The result has been well short of the renaissance Mr. Abe promised.

A German state bad bank has accelerated the wind-up of Dublin-based lender Depfa Bank, after buying back €5.6 billion of its bonds from the market so far this year, the Irish Times reported. The move by bad bank FMS Wertmanagement to mop up Depfa Bank’s liabilities in the market comes as it also shrinks the lender’s assets at pace. A spokesman for FMS-WM in Munich said the wind-down is currently being carried out “faster than planned”. However, he declined to say when the bank would ultimately be wound down.

The target of a takeover bid, Iraqi oil player Gulf Keystone Petroleum said most of the parties with an interest in the company are in favor of restructuring. The company, which lists headquarters in London, reached an agreement last month with the majority of its creditors and shareholders to restructure its debt obligations. Andrew Simon in July stepped down as chairman, opening the door for non-executive director Keith Lough to help steer a $500 million debt conversion proposal. The company is focused on developing the Shaikan oil field in the Kurdish north of Iraq.

The Bank of England's stress tests are "worse than useless", according to a report claiming British banks would buckle under the strain of a major economic shock, BT.com reported. A study by the Adam Smith Institute said the Bank's stress tests are like a "ridiculously easy exam with a ludicrously low pass rate", which disguises the ability of UK banks to cope with an economic blow on the scale of the 2008 financial crisis. The report, which pinpoints 13 flaws in the stress test, said every single UK lender would currently fail "more rigorous" stress tests by the US Federal Reserve.

The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) has re-appointed receivers to 36 companies and borrowers to ease the sale of their loans, the reported. The State agency published a series of official notices showing that it has appointed receivers to the firms, whose loans it took over from the banks in the wake of the property crash. As it stands, the individual receivers appointed to the companies and assets involved can only act for Nama. This could create difficulties should the agency want to sell the loans to a third party, who would then be entitled to call in the debt.

Was Larry Summers right after all? Around the world, governments are planning fresh spending to boost growth and support wages, heeding the advice of the Harvard University economist and others who have argued that economies need the jolt as society ages and productivity sags, Bloomberg News reported. That’s signaling the ascendancy of energizers like Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the firing of austerity advocates such as former U.K. Chancellor George Osborne. The shift away from budget rigor and reliance on monetary policy has been subtle and isn’t universal.

Two key gauges of Chinese factory output in July showed conflicting results, with one that focuses on larger state-owned companies flagging and the other, on smaller private companies, soaring, The Wall Street Journal reported. The National Bureau of Statistics said Monday that the official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index dipped into negative territory for the first time in five months, to 49.9 last month from 50.0 in June. It fell short of many economists’ expectations.

Mahathir Mohamad has attacked Singapore’s handling of alleged money-laundering linked to Malaysian state investment fund 1MDB. In an interview with the Financial Times, Malaysia’s influential former prime minister accused Singapore of failing to target the protagonists in what is alleged to be a global scheme to siphon off more than $3.5bn from the fund. “Notice that the government of Singapore is very reluctant to pinpoint the people involved in this corruption,” Mr Mahathir said. “It affects Singapore’s reputation as a financial centre. It is not doing the right thing.