Headlines

The pressure on Turkey’s lira isn’t likely to ease any time soon, which could mean more pain for one of the most battered emerging-market currencies, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The lira sank to a record low against the dollar yesterday, pressured by domestic political uncertainty, escalating violence and the prospect of a lowered credit-rating outlook on top of the possibility of a U.S. interest-rate increase later this week. The uncertainty isn’t expected to let up before elections slated for November.

As if being kicked out of one of the world’s biggest emerging-market bond indexes isn’t enough, Nigeria now faces the risk of its credit rating falling further into junk, Bloomberg News reported today. Standard & Poor’s, which rates Africa’s largest oil producer four levels below investment grade at B+ with a stable outlook, releases a review of its assessment on Sept. 18. A week later, it’s the turn of Fitch Ratings, which has Nigeria at BB-, one level above S&P, with a negative outlook.

Sweden’s central bank governor has warned that new crisis-busting tools policymakers are embracing around the world to counter asset bubbles and other financial dangers are susceptible to political inaction and turf wars, the Financial Times reported today. Stefan Ingves, governor of the Riksbank, said so-called macroprudential policies — such as capital requirements and leverage limits — had so far failed in Sweden where house prices and personal debt levels have soared to record levels.

Benjamin Wey was arrested by the FBI at his Manhattan home on Thursday and charged him with securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in an eight-count indictment unsealed in a federal court in Manhattan, the New York Times reported on Friday.

Household debt in Canada hit a record high in the second quarter, as borrowing accelerated at a quicker pace than after-tax income growth, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The bulk of the new borrowing was for mortgages as consumers took advantage of a surprise rate cut by the Bank of Canada in January, the first of two cuts this year aimed at boosting an economy bruised by a commodity-price rout.

European Union efforts to build a financial-transactions tax among 11 nations pressed on in a bid to break a deadlock over what to tax and at what rate, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday. “Important advances were made” at a meeting among participating nations on Saturday in Luxembourg, said French Finance Minister Michel Sapin. He said that France continues to push for a wide base and a low rate for the trading levies. Sapin said that ministers agreed to tax gross trades rather than net transactions, which would include high frequency trading.

Brazilian companies that piled on $270 billion in international debt during the boom years are seeing their funding costs rise after the nation’s credit rating was cut to junk, Bloomberg News reported today. The spread for five-year credit-default swaps to protect against a government default, one benchmark for setting what Brazilian companies must pay for external funding, has jumped 7.5 percent to 400 basis points since the downgrade, the highest since 2009. Read more.

The president of Brazil should have been ecstatic. She had just won re-election after an intense campaign in which she fiercely defended her role in making Brazil, for a few fleeting years, a rising star on the global stage, the International New York Times reported. But in the days after her victory last October, President Dilma Rousseff was worried, confronted in private deliberations with her closest advisers by signs that Brazil’s triumphs were at risk of coming undone. “We went too far,” Aloízio Mercadante, Ms.

Poland's second-biggest power firm Tauron said on Thursday it has submitted an offer to buy assets owned by the troubled state-run Brzeszcze mine, Reuters reported. The already highly-indebted Tauron said it submitted the offer through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) in which it will ultimately hold a 40-percent stake. The rest of the SPV will be controlled by two other state-run entities. SRK, a state-owned coal mines restructuring company and the current Brzeszcze owner, has announced a public tender to sell the mine, meeting one of the conditions set by Tauron for it to submit an offer.

The State’s bank guarantee from September 2008 was “too generous” and “magnified the fiscal impact of the banking crisis”, said the European Commission’s director general for economic and financial affairs, the Irish Times reported. “At the same time, it is clear that the decision was taken in a very difficult situation characterised by great risks and uncertainty,” Marco Buti told the banking inquiry.