Headlines

In the days of the commodity boom a few years ago, oil-rich nations and their petrodollar wealth were the darlings of the World Economic Forum, Bloomberg News reported. A panel that included Kuwaiti, Saudi and Russian sovereign-wealth fund officials was one the hottest tickets at Davos in January 2008, just before oil prices surged to $150 a barrel. It was a time when crude producers were accumulating billions of dollars in debt and equities, plus real estate, sports teams and other trophy assets.

The number of jobless people in the world is set to rise this year, as problems in emerging markets prevent the global unemployment rate from returning to pre-crisis level, the Financial Times reported. The International Labour Organisation, a UN agency, forecasts that the number of unemployed people in emerging and developing countries will increase by 4.8m in the next two years. In particular, rising jobless numbers in China, Brazil, Russia and elsewhere will offset improvements in the US and Europe, it says.

Troubled oil and gas company Petroceltic has confirmed it has been given more breathing by its banks today as it continues its search for a buyer, the Irish Times reported. The publicly quoted exploration company is in breach of its senior bank facilities, but has received a number of waivers on loan repayments from its lenders. The latest waiver, which expired on Friday, has been extended until the end of the month.

French President François Hollande said Monday he will pour more than €2 billion ($2.2 billion) in public money into apprenticeships and training schemes as part of an emergency plan to combat the unrelenting rise in unemployment, The Wall Street Journal reported. The French leader said economic growth remains too weak to have a sustainable impact on unemployment, which has crept upwards throughout his presidency to reach 10.6% last year, an 18-year high.

Dozens of large shareholders in Volkswagen plan to sue the carmaker in a German court, seeking compensation for the plunge in its shares due to its emissions test cheating scandal, the International New York Times reported. Law firm Nieding + Barth said on Monday it would lodge a case with a regional court in Brunswick this week, seeking hundreds of millions of euros in damages on behalf of 66 institutional investors from the United States and Britain. "On top of that, we collected several thousands of private investors.

Sainty Marine Corporation started small, buying and selling a few ships in the 1980s. But Sainty Marine, a Chinese state-owned company, went on a debt-fueled binge over the last few years, opening its own shipyards and signing orders worth hundreds of millions of dollars each, the International New York Times reported. Now, heavily indebted companies like Sainty Marine are at the center of the economic troubles in China that have unsettled currency, commodity and stock markets of late.

Concerns about the €40bn of non-performing loans on the balance sheet of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena reduced the market capitalisation of Italy’s third-largest lender by assets to just €2.2bn as its shares hit a record low, the Financial Times reported. Led by Monte dei Paschi, shares in Italian banks fell sharply amid predictions of a tough year for the sector as an estimated €330bn in NPLs and low interest rates weigh on profitability.

Canadian policy makers are heading into a tough week as pressure mounts on them to revive an economy that has been among the hardest hit by the commodity rout, The Wall Street Journal reported. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet colleagues will convene in a seaside resort town on Canada’s east coast Monday amid more evidence growth may have stalled again after sputtering to life in last year’s third quarter. A recent string of dismal economic news—and a free-falling Canadian dollar—has led to calls for Mr.

The number of jobless people in the world is set to rise this year, as problems in emerging markets prevent the global unemployment rate from returning to pre-crisis level, the Financial Times reported. The International Labour Organisation, a UN agency, forecasts that the number of unemployed people in emerging and developing countries will increase by 4.8m in the next two years. In particular, rising jobless numbers in China, Brazil, Russia and elsewhere will offset improvements in the US and Europe, it says.

Communist China has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality, with the richest 1 per cent of households owning a third of the country’s wealth, a report from Peking University has found, the Financial Times reported. The poorest 25 per cent of Chinese households own just 1 per cent of the country’s total wealth, the study found. China’s Gini coefficient for income, a widely used measure of inequality, was 0.49 in 2012, according to the report. The World Bank considers a coefficient above 0.40 to represent severe income inequality.