Headlines

The International Monetary Fund Monday urged Germany to step up investment and accelerate structural reforms to boost its growth prospects and alleviate the negative effects of a rapidly aging society, The Wall Street Journal reported. “More progress on structural reforms would revitalize potential growth and enhance the authorities’ leadership at the European level in this area,” the Washington-based fund said in a statement.

As Malaysia’s state-owned investment company reaches out to bondholders to explain why it has defaulted, some investors say they can’t wait to hear the end of the saga, Bloomberg News reported. 1Malaysia Development Bhd., which defaulted on dollar-denominated bonds last month and faces another coupon payment Wednesday, said it plans a call on May 23 to explain its dispute with a co-guarantor and how it plans to meet future obligations.

The hot topic in Korean corporate circles today is undoubtedly the moves by the government and state-run policy banks to bail out the ailing shipbuilding and shipping companies, The Korea Herald reported. Given the importance of these sectors in Korea and their prolonged financial distress, it is understandable that the government has pushed the panic button. The process of bailing them out has been set in motion with some sort of consensus reached between the Finance Ministry and Bank of Korea. BOK Gov.

Ireland is no longer seeking further debt relief from its European partners, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has said, as he arrived in Brussels on Monday for a key eurogroup meeting on Greece. While Ireland had been targeting debt relief through direct recapitalisation of Bank of Ireland and AIB by the ESM fund, the euro zone’s bailout fund, Mr Noonan said that this mechanism was no longer being sought. “We’ve got what we wanted.

Capital flows from China persisted in April despite a reported rise in foreign exchange reserves, which mainly reflected the impact of a weaker dollar on the central bank’s euro and yen holdings, the Financial Times reported. After falling for 18 of 20 months until February, slicing $791bn off the headline total, China’s official reserves rose by a combined $17bn in March and April, hitting $3.22tn last month. But a look inside the data suggests significant latent outflow pressure remains. China has also benefited from global tailwinds in recent months that may not last.

Greece returns to center stage on Monday when aid deliberations by its international creditors will signal whether the country faces a renewed period of political drift or wins some economic breathing space after six years of turbulence, Bloomberg News reported. The euro area and the International Monetary Fund will assess whether Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has made enough budget-tightening commitments to gain another aid disbursement. At issue is an IMF demand for fiscal “contingency measures” worth about 3.5 billion euros ($4 billion) in case Greece strays off budgetary course.

Greek workers walked off the job on Friday, heeding a call by the country’s labor unions to join a three-day general strike to protest a new round of austerity measures including new pension cuts and tax increases, the International New York Times reported. The strike came as Greek lawmakers debated the new measures, worth 5.4 billion euros, or $6.2 billion, in budget savings, before a vote Sunday night and a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels the next day.

Plans by the Malaysian government to shut down the troubled state fund at the heart of a multinational investigation could saddle the government with billions of dollars in debt and may be a first step toward a government bailout, opposition leaders said, the International New York Times reported. The government announced plans this week to close the fund, which was created by Prime Minister Najib Razak and is suspected of being the source of hundreds of millions of dollars deposited in his personal bank accounts.

The euro zone is tying itself in knots over whether to limit banks' holdings of their own governments' bonds or to make them set aside more capital against home sovereign risk, Reuters reported in an analysis. Germany, the bloc's dominant power, has made such "risk reduction" measures, as it calls them, a prior condition before it will accept any further "risk sharing" in Europe's banking union through a common deposit insurance scheme.

With the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code inching towards reality, early redress of almost 75,000 cases involving debt of an estimated ₹3.5-lakh crore is what the government and stakeholders expect, The Hindu Business Line reported. While the Debt Recovery Tribunals (DRT) will resolve individual bankruptcy cases, the National Company Law Tribunal will work on corporate insolvency. The reasons for the pile-up of cases varied from legal lacunae to insufficient technical expertise in dealing with such cases. Labour and infrastructure issues also played a big role in hindering resolution.