Headlines

Banks’ demands that small business owners personally guarantee their companies’ loans are hindering the supply of credit, a survey published today says, the Irish Times reported. The Irish Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (Isme) association’s quarterly Bank Watch Survey shows that 43 per cent of businesses that sought credit during the first three months of the year were refused. The number is lower than in the previous quarter, when the banks refused close to half the small businesses that applied to them for loans.

The head of China’s top economic-planning agency Sunday rejected suggestions the Chinese slowdown was dragging on global growth and markets, saying the world’s second largest economy continues to be a source of demand and vitality, The Wall Street Journal reported. National Development and Reform Commission chief Xu Shaoshi cited the 6.9% growth the economy clocked last year and the high volume of commodities it is importing as among the contributions China is making to global economic health. Even as the government is lowering its growth target for the slowing economy, Mr.

In a rare piece of good news for the crisis-racked European Union, Cyprus is about to finish its financial bailout, leaving neighboring Greece as the only country in the eurozone that still needs rescue loans, The Wall Street Journal reported. Eurozone finance ministers are expected to announce on Monday that Cyprus will exit its €10 billion ($11 billion) program on March 23, according to Cypriot officials.

Petroceltic International says it is taking legal advice in relation to a surprise attempt by Worldview Capital, a dissident shareholder with a 29 per cent stake, to appoint an examiner to the exploration company, the Irish Times reported. Worldview on Friday brought a High Court petition aimed at securing court protection for Petroceltic, which owes about $230 million to its banks and is currently unable to make its repayments. Worldview is seeking the appointment of of high-profile Grant Thornton accountant Michael McAteer as an examiner to the exploration company.

A decadelong commodity boom brought sleek shopping malls, tidy brick homes and dozens of private schools to this palm-pocked mining town in the heart of Africa, The Wall Street Journal reported The population doubled and incomes soared as record copper prices and a flood of Chinese investment and workers transformed a region bordering war-ravaged Congo into a beacon for Africa’s rising middle class.

Ulster Bank is embarking on a fresh clampdown on businesses seriously behind on loan repayments in a bid to clean up its balance sheet, the Irish Times reported. The Irish lender sold thousands of property bubble-era loans to investors such as US company Cerberus Capital Management in a programme that started in 2013 and ended late last year. Ulster has begun contacting businesses with long-term loan arrears, telling them they should either repay or refinance their debts, or risk having them sold to a third party.

For three hours on a recent Thursday, Norway’s state-owned oil-and-gas company Statoil ASA transformed these offshore rigs into a marketing platform for a special guest: the European Union’s energy czar, Maros Sefcovic, The Wall Street Journal reported. Natural-gas fields like Sleipner have helped cook meals and heat homes in Europe for several decades, but their output will gradually fade away. To replace those aging North Sea fields, Norway is considering plowing billions of dollars into similar installations 1,000 miles to the north, in the Barents Sea.

It looks like subprime derivatives on steroids: China hopes to bundle together billions of dollars’ worth of non-performing loans and eventually sell them to global investors, the Financial Times reported. Such a massive securitisation programme would represent the latest tactic in China’s campaign to lift one of the biggest shadows cast over its slowing economy — a debt pile that is as big as 230 per cent of GDP. It would whittle back debts at Chinese banks and move some of the risk outside the domestic financial system.

Several small Polish lenders will fail this year, but their bankruptcies will not hurt Poland's financial system, deputy Finance Minister Konrad Raczkowski said. "Several banks are 'toxic' and they will fail this year still. They are small lenders, let me reassure you right away, and it will not disturb the Polish financial system," Raczkowski was quoted as saying by state agency PAP on Thursday. The failures will not be caused by Poland's new bank asset tax, Raczkowski said, but will be a result of mismanagement and poor institutional supervision.

Credit cards on the limit, huge bank borrowings and a struggle to repay loans: these are the personal debt problems of some Qataris despite the Gulf state's reputation for fabulous wealth, Reuters reported. Generous government salaries and free healthcare, funded by vast natural gas reserves in a country with only about 300,000 citizens, do not always translate into healthy bank balances for ordinary Qataris.