Headlines

U.S. Steel Canada Inc. will seek a court order to continue restructuring under court protection beyond this year, the company said Thursday, the Financial Post reported on a Canadian Press story. The former Stelco Inc., purchased by U.S. Steel in 2007, has been operating under Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act protection since September 2014, and it was most recently extended until Dec. 11, 2015.

Britain's second-largest steelmaker, SSI UK, said on Friday it was halting operations at its Redcar plant in northeast England, calling into question the future of its business and putting 2,000 jobs at risk. The company, a unit of Thailand's largest steelmaker Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI), said a sharp decline in steel prices had hurt its business. Thai banking sources told Reuters that SSI has debts of about 47-48 billion baht ($1.3 bln) related to its UK business and was negotiating with creditors on a debt restructuring, with talks expected to conclude next week.

Greek leftist Alexis Tsipras stormed back into office with an unexpectedly decisive election victory on Sunday, claiming a clear mandate to steer Greece's battered economy to recovery, Reuters reported. The vote ensured Europe's most outspoken leftist leader would remain Greece's dominant political figure, despite having been abandoned by party radicals last month after he caved in to demands for austerity to win a bailout from the euro zone.

With its market dominance, banking talent, global ambition and sterling political connections, Citic Securities fancied itself the Goldman Sachs of China, the International New York Times reported. Citic Securities, the brokerage arm of the biggest state-owned financial conglomerate, rode China’s stock market boom and a surge in corporate borrowing. The company’s stock price tripled in six months.

Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday approved an $18bn debt restructuring deal despite fears that a populist backlash against the proposals would jeopardise the vote, in turn plunging the war-torn and recession-battered country into an imminent default and deep political crisis, the Financial Times reported. A comfortable majority of MPs supported a package of measures sanctioning the debt deal, including a 20 per cent “haircut” or writedown for creditors.

Switzerland’s economic growth will stay below its potential this year and next, the government said. Output will expand 0.9 per cent in 2015 and 1.5 per cent in 2016, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs in Bern said on Thursday, the Irish Times reported. Its previous prediction, issued in June, was for growth of 0.8 per cent and 1.6 per cent, respectively. Economic growth has slowed after the Swiss National Bank gave up its cap on the franc eight months ago.

By backpedalling on its budget promises during the past month, the government has cost Brazil its prized investment-grade credit rating and sent its currency, the real, plummeting against the dollar as bond spreads soar, the Financial Times reported. Analysts are competing with forecasts of further weakening for the real, but some market observers wonder whether the moment has come for bargain-hunting among Brazilian assets. “I’m not calling the bottom necessarily,” says Fernando Honorato, chief economist of Bradesco Asset Management, referring to the Brazilian market.

The Federal Reserve’s decision Thursday to keep interest rates pinned near zero could put added pressure on the European Central Bank to step up its own stimulus efforts to keep the euro’s exchange rate from strengthening too much and derailing Europe’s fragile economic recovery, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Fed kept interest rates unchanged after a two-day meeting that concluded Thursday in one of the most hotly anticipated meetings in years. A recovering U.S. economy with falling unemployment had fanned expectations that the Fed would start slowing raising interest rates.

Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Games will be the first of a leaner type of competition that will limit spending on big-ticket venues to avoid alienating the public, Chief Executive Officer Toshiro Muto said, two months after debt-ridden Japan canceled plans for a futuristic main stadium, Bloomberg News reported. The International Olympic Committee last year set out a new agenda that favors existing venues over purpose-built stadiums, as concerns mount in potential host countries over the burden of holding the event.

Standard & Poor’s on Wednesday lowered Japan’s sovereign debt rating one notch, in the latest sign of concern about Japan’s economic prospects nearly three years after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took power, The Wall Street Journal reported. S&P said it was lowering the rating to A-plus from AA-minus because weak economic growth makes it less likely that the government can quickly improve the nation’s fiscal health.