Headlines

French President François Hollande’s government said Wednesday it will ramp up austerity measures in the next two years to stay on track with budget targets, despite a looming presidential election, The Wall Street Journal reported. The French finance ministry said it would find an additional €3.8 billion ($4.31 billion) of savings this year and another €5 billion in 2017 to ensure France meets its pledge of getting the budget deficit under the European limit of 3% of economic output. The belt-tightening indicates Mr.

Global policy makers need to guard against a self-reinforcing “spiral” of weakening growth and rising debt that could require a coordinated response by the world’s major economies, according to the IMF’s top fiscal watchdog, Bloomberg News reported. Most countries are on a higher debt path than they were a year ago, the International Monetary Fund said in its semi-annual Fiscal Monitor report released Wednesday.

China Railway Materials Co., a government-backed company that halted trading of its bonds earlier in the week, said Wednesday it’s seeking to restructure its debt, Bloomberg News reported. The supplier of steel and cement for railways held a meeting with 19 lenders on April 5, according to a Wednesday company filing. China Railway reported on its operating and financial conditions in the meeting, the filing said, without giving details of the meeting result. As Premier Li Keqiang pushes through reforms, many bloated state firms have stumbled in the debt market.

Small investors, angry over lost savings, are emerging as a new security threat to Chinese authorities, who are watching warily as investors around the country hit the streets in protest and picket government offices to demand their money back, The Wall Street Journal reported. Protests have flared from Shanghai to the southwestern hub of Kunming to the ancient former capital of Xi’an. Crowds gathered outside the securities regulator’s Beijing offices after equity markets collapsed last summer.

Chinese courts have ordered cash-strapped Shandong Shanshui Cement Group Ltd to pay back its creditors 2.4 billion yuan ($372 million), the company said in a statement posted on the Shanghai Clearing House website on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The company said it was unlikely to be able to make the required payments due to financial difficulties, and the courts would take steps such as auctioning off the firm's assets to meet these obligations.

Kuala Lumpur is facing intensifying international pressure after Swiss authorities said former officials at an Abu Dhabi sovereign fund were being investigated over suspected crimes linked to 1MDB, Malaysia’s state investment fund, the Financial Times reported. The Swiss attorney-general also said in a statement on Tuesday that a portion of funds allegedly misappropriated from 1MDB appeared to have been diverted to a “company related to the motion picture industry”.

Italian officials and financial firms agreed to create a multibillion-euro fund to help weakened banks raise capital and unload bad loans, as the nation tries to assuage investor jitters and avert a crisis, the Irish Times reported. The new fund, named Atlante, will be supported by numerous institutions, its manager, Quaestio Capital Management SGR, said late Monday after more than a week of meetings among banks, insurers and state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.

Debt-laden Australian steel maker Arrium Ltd will get a new administrator after the company's major lenders and workers union filed an application in a federal court seeking to have Grant Thornton replaced, Reuters reported. The application seeks to appoint KordaMentha as replacement voluntary administrators of Arrium and 93 of its Australian subsidiaries. Grant Thornton said in a statement that it supported the application. The decision comes a week ahead of the first creditors' meeting. Arrium went into administration last week with debts exceeding A$2.8 billion ($2.14 billion).

The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that a British exit from the European Union risks severely damaging the global economy, adding its voice to an intense debate ahead of the country’s June referendum on the question, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Washington-based fund listed the possibility of Britain leaving the EU as one of seven major risks to the global economy in the year ahead, alongside worries over the health of the Chinese economy and turbulence in financial markets.

An Abu Dhabi state fund said publicly for the first time on Monday that it hadn’t received billions of dollars in payments that a controversial Malaysian fund set up by Prime Minister Najib Razak claims it sent, The Wall Street Journal reported.