Headlines

Cash-strapped China Shanshui Cement has received several demands for repayments from creditors, following a default even as it had started winding up proceedings, it said in a stock exchange filing. The default was on a 2 billion yuan bond which was due on Thursday, about which the company had warned a day before. The company said that China Construction Bank had demanded repayment of a $50 million loan by Thursday failing which it would institute legal proceedings against its subsidiary China Pioneer Cement, which owed the debt.

Hundreds of thousands of Greeks walked off their jobs on Thursday to protest austerity economics, as officials of the leftist-led government wrangled with the country’s international creditors over the terms of Greece’s third bailout. At least one Athens protest turned violent, the International New York Times reported. The 24-hour walkout shut down public services, forced the cancellation of flights and disrupted public transportation across the country. Ferries remained moored in ports, hospitals were operating with reduced staff, and museums and archaeological sites were closed.

Mario Draghi has signalled that the European Central Bank is ready to boost its stimulus programmes next month as inflation wanes and economic prospects worsen, the Irish Times reported. “Signs of a sustained turnaround in core inflation have somewhat weakened,” the ECB president told a hearing in the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday. The odds that the ECB will cut its deposit rate in December climbed to 100 per cent from about 88 per cent before the speech, ECB-dated Eonia forwards showed.

Kazakhstan’s president certainly caught the imagination of the City of London. In closed-door meetings last week, Nursultan Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials said the commodity-rich central Asian nation would unload hundreds of companies, including its industrial crown jewels, in the most ambitious privatisation drive since its independence from the Soviet Union, the Financial Times reported.

The European Central Bank (ECB) pushed for a quick fire sale of Irish bank assets as Ireland entered the bail-out programme in late 2010, putting the protection of its own balance sheet ahead of the interest of Irish taxpayers, former IMF deputy director Ajai Chopra has said. Mr Chopra, who was one of the senior IMF officials responsible for the design and monitoring of the bailout programme, wrote in a report for the European Parliament that the ECB’s advice on fiscal policy and structural reforms - which he said were outside its mandate - were wrong for Ireland.

Romania has an insolvency incidence over four times higher than the Central and Eastern European (CEE) average, according to a study by Coface, Romania-Insider.com reported. About 45 of 1,000 active companies in Romania entered insolvency in 2014, the highest rate in the region. Serbia came second, with 41 insolvencies for each 1,000 companies, followed by Hungary, with 29. At the other end, Poland only had 0.5 insolvencies for each 1,000 companies, while the regional average was 10.

China’s consumers are gradually picking up the baton from the traditional economic engines of manufacturing and real estate, data released on Wednesday show, as the painful rebalancing process inches ahead, the Financial Times reported. The slowdown of factory activity and construction pushed Chinese gross domestic product growth to its lowest annual pace since 2009 in the third quarter at 6.9 per cent, and the latest data suggest these sectors have not yet bottomed out.

A reluctance to pursue distressed borrowers is one reason why Piraeus is judged to be the most precarious among Greece’s four top lenders, according to the European Central Bank’s latest health check of the sector, the Financial Times reported. As Greece’s biggest bank, shoring up the finances of Piraeus, and those of its peers, will be crucial in kick-starting lending to the country’s economy, helping it to climb out of a brutal recession that has shrunk the economy by almost a quarter since 2009.

China's factory output and investment weakened in October while retail sales growth edged up, suggesting economic growth has stabilized but has yet to revive despite repeated interest rate cuts and other stimulus, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. The data reported Wednesday reflected the two-speed nature of the economy as communist leaders try to encourage growth based on consumer spending instead of trade, investment and heavy industry. Economic growth decelerated to a six-year low of 6.9 percent in the latest quarter.

The European Central Bank has made a fresh push to level the playing field for lenders in the single currency area, unveiling a proposal to hammer out major differences in banking rules across the region’s 19 member states, the Financial Times reported. Harmonising disparate banking standards has long been a priority for the ECB’s supervisor-in-chief, Danièle Nouy, who believes this is vital to encourage more cross-border lending and fairer supervision.