Headlines

Massive overcapacity in China's steel industry is not yet falling, a vice minister said on Monday, as the country's leading steel companies conceded that current output was unsustainable and blamed the restart of mills previously shut, the International New York Times reported. China is facing anger and calls for trade penalties to block its exports by global rivals, who say it is dumping cheap exports after a slowdown in demand at home.

The European Central Bank has come under renewed pressure in Germany, after a group of academics and business people filed a complaint at the country’s highest court over the monetary policymakers’ mass bond-buying programme, the Financial Times reported. The ECB has faced repeated criticism from the economic and political establishment in the eurozone’s largest economy over the policies it has adopted to fight the threat of falling prices.

Junior oil sands producer Connacher Oil and Gas Ltd filed for protection from creditors at an Alberta court on Monday, making it the latest Canadian victim of the two-year slump in global crude prices, Reuters reported. The Calgary-based company said depressed oil prices and difficulties accessing capital markets had prompted directors to seek protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA).

Yousuf Bhailok, the Preston-based property millionaire, is pulling out of the race to save BHS after administrators told buyers to sweeten their offers by tens of millions of pounds, the Telegraph reported. The administrators are also demanding that all of the retailers shops are included in any bid. Mr Bhailok confirmed to The Telegraph that he had withdrawn his interest. He pulled out of the process after being told that he would have to make an offer to buy all of BHS’s 164 shops, including 40 loss-making stores that are on the administrators' “red list”.

The Romanian insolvency law should be modified because it’s to permissive, according to Dragos Doros, the president of Romania’s National Fiscal Administration Agency – ANAF, Romania Insider reported. The state has been losing big amounts of money from firms that went into insolvency to take advantage of the holes in the law and avoid paying their taxes. “Almost every company that enters insolvency leads us to the conclusion that we will not get much from it.

Brussels is exploring granting bank regulators tougher “guillotine” powers to freeze transfers out of a failing bank to prevent it haemorrhaging cash before authorities can intervene. The European Commission will study options for a “moratorium tool” that could be applied across the EU, according to a document seen by the Financial Times. While work on the measure is at an early stage, the powers would abruptly halt payments to bondholders and potentially even prevent depositor withdrawals.

Implicit guarantees are ubiquitous in China, but one company went a step further when it appealed to the central bank to give an explicit reassurance to creditors that the government will not permit any default, the Financial Times reported. China City Construction Holding Group Co saw yields on its Hong Kong-traded “dim sum” bonds spike recently after a surprise privatisation, highlighting the ways moral hazard distorts capital allocation in the world’s largest economy.

Greece will not accept a bailout deal without a concrete agreement for debt relief from the country’s European creditors, a top aide to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said, The Wall Street Journal reported. “We want real solutions, not interim solutions,” Nikos Pappas, Greece’s Minister of State, said in an interview Friday after several days of talks with senior U.S. officials. “No more kicking the can down the road.” Although Mr.

China’s run of disappointing April data underscore the bind facing policy makers seeking to cut capacity from the worst-performing sectors and curb credit excesses in recovering ones without stalling the economy. Bloomberg’s monthly gross domestic product tracker shows growth slowed to 6.88 percent in April, from 7.11 percent in March. Weak steel and coal output dragged on industrial production, which increased 6 percent from a year earlier versus economists’ forecasts of 6.5 percent, while retail and investment readings also disappointed, according to reports released on Saturday.

Saudi Arabia’s credit rating has been downgraded by Moody’s because of the long and deep slump in oil prices, The Guardian reported. Moody’s Investors Service said it also downgraded Gulf oil producers Bahrain and Oman. It left ratings unchanged for other Gulf states including Kuwait and Qatar. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil exporter. Moody’s cut the country’s long-term issuer rating one notch to A1 from Aa3 after a review that began in March. Crude prices fell from more than $100 in mid-2014 to under $30 a barrel in February, although they have recovered into the mid-$40s.