Headlines

Lufthansa cancelled almost 1,000 flights for Monday after a union for its striking cabin crews announced plans to expand its work stoppages to Munich airport, the Irish Times reported. The airline said it was ready to resume negotiations. UFO, the cabin crews’ union, said talks over disputed retirement rules collapsed, triggering the resumption of strikes after a pause on Sunday. Day-long strikes will begin at 4.30am on Monday in Munich, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf and continue for at least 18 hours, the union said.

Of the UK’s 5,500 care home operators, the risk management group estimates that as many as 1,650 companies are struggling financially, and of those it expects a quarter, which account for 1,500 sites, to fall into insolvency, Express.co.uk reported. Many groups in the sector are struggling to meet the interest payments on their debts, because of rising staff costs and local authorities cutting fees in response to Whitehall demands for savings.

Last month’s elections in Portugal were meant to deliver a clear verdict on the center-right coalition of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, whose austerity program has been held up as a model by creditors and countries like Germany that have advocated belt-tightening in Europe, the International New York Times reported.

Turkey's Yuksel Insaat is facing a revolt from a growing faction of investors who have vowed not to vote in favour of a critical restructuring plan, which could push one of the country's largest construction companies into insolvency. Yuksel Insaat, which is the operating company of Yuksel Holding, is trying to restructure US$200m 9.5% bonds, equal to more than half of its debt. The notes mature on November 10. The issuer is due to have a Scheme of Arrangement hearing at the UK High Court a day before the notes' maturity.

Regulators provided more details on Thursday on next year’s tests of the European banking sector, as they prepare to examine the ability of the region’s lenders to survive a financial crisis or severe economic downturn, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The European Banking Authority, which regulates lenders in the European Union, said the stress tests would begin at the end of February, when the final methodology will be made public. The results will be released in the third quarter of 2016.

Mark Carney said the Bank of England would consider making it harder for lenders to extend credit, in order to prevent a recovery fuelled by historically low interest rates from becoming dangerously unbalanced, the Financial Times reported. With the BoE joining other leading central banks in taking a more dovish approach to monetary policy, the governor’s words showed he recognised the potentially damaging side effects of a long period of extremely low borrowing costs.

The world is becoming less welcoming to tax dodgers, The Economist reported. That is the conclusion of the latest Financial Secrecy Index, published every two years by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), an NGO. It looks at various measures of financial transparency and information-sharing in more than 90 countries, then weights them according to the level of financial services each country provides to non-residents. Most countries’ scores have fallen since 2013, indicating greater transparency.

Household debt fell to its lowest level since the first quarter of 2006 in the period April to June, according to new Central Bank data, the Irish Times reported. The latest figures show debt fell to €153.2 billion or €33,056 per capita in the second quarter of 2015, a decline of €1.3 billion or 0.9 per cent versus the preceding quarter. For the same quarter last year, household debt fell by €1.7 billion. The decline reflected debt repayments, write-downs and write-offs. The level of household debt has fallen by 24.8 per cent since its peak of €203.7bn in 2008.

In Brazil, many captains of finance are unwilling to risk upsetting the government by expressing their concerns publicly about the country’s economic crisis. Don’t put Jose Olympio Pereira in that group. Just seconds into an interview in Sao Paulo last week, the CEO of Credit Suisse Group AG’s Brazil unit made his views crystal clear when, in response to a question about the state of affairs in the country, he replied: "we are very bad." And when he says "very bad," he means it.

It seems extraordinary that private investors could contemplate pouring billions of euros back into Greece so soon after its near-death experience, The Wall Street Journal reported. It is only three months since the country was on the brink of being forced out of the eurozone. The six-month standoff between Greece’s left-wing government and its international creditors plunged the economy back into recession, leading to the imposition of capital controls that continue to limit how much cash depositors can withdraw or send out of the country.