Headlines

Barclays Plc is considering shifting its businesses into eight entities in response to rules forcing Britain’s largest lenders to separate retail operations from riskier investment-banking units, an internal document shows. The lender is reviewing whether to put its U.K. and European retail operations, its U.S. holding company and a subsidiary carrying out back-office functions within a firewall, separating them from five other entities including a derivatives trading arm, according to the draft document obtained by Bloomberg News. The proposals will go to the board on Dec. 11.

Four of South Africa's biggest banks are owed $53 million by Ellerine, the money-losing furniture firm that African Bank Investments (Abil) cut funding to just before the lender collapsed, documents showed, Reuters reported. The debt reflects the extent to which Abil's failure in August has rippled across corporate South Africa, knocking credit ratings, investor confidence and even hurting small suppliers such as florists and panel beaters.

The Dutch financial services firm ING Group said on Wednesday that it would make a final repayment six months earlier than expected of the billions of euros in state aid it received during the financial crisis, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. ING, based in Amsterdam, said it planned to make its final payment of 1.03 billion euros, or about $1.29 billion, to the Dutch government on Friday. The lender had expected to pay the final installment in May 2015.

China’s small-loan providers have virtually halved lending as the slowing economy turns both lenders and borrowers more wary of risk, the Financial Times reported. New loans from China’s 8,591 small-loan providers came to just Rmb89bn ($14.5bn) in the first nine months of 2014, virtually half the Rmb161bn level in the same period last year, according to central bank data.

Companies have been going bust in the European Union at the rate of about 200,000 a year for most of the period since the financial crisis. Now that figure is beginning to decline, especially in parts of Southern Europe, The Economist reported. However, legal systems across the continent are making insolvencies more difficult to resolve quickly. But handily, the surge in bankruptcies during the worst years—as well as growing concern that outmoded rules are slowing the flow of capital to firms that could use it better—has initiated a wave of reforms around much of Europe.

Bank of Ireland repossessed 621 owner-occupied or buy-to-let properties in the first half of this year, according to documents submitted to the Oireachtas finance committee in advance of the appearance by its chief executive Richie Boucher today, the Irish Times reported. Bank of Ireland has told the committee that 322 judgments were enforced against owner-occupiers, with 299 on buy-to-let investments. This means that the property was either in the bank’s possession or had been sold. In the first six months of this year, the bank had sold 80 properties that it had repossessed.

The verdict is in on the International Monetary Fund’s call for government austerity in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis: bad idea, Bloomberg News reported. Where the fund went awry was in its 2010 shift away from recommending government stimulus to calling for budget cuts in the biggest advanced economies, according to a report released today by the IMF’s internal watchdog, the Independent Evaluation Office. That turn was inappropriate given the global recovery’s modest pace, the report said.

Australia could face its first recession in almost 25 years unless authorities further stimulate the economy, Morgan Stanley said. The nation’s economy will expand just 1.9 percent in 2015, with 1.5 percentage points of that coming from higher exports, and unemployment will climb to 6.8 percent, Morgan Stanley economists led by Daniel Blake said in a research report today. They project the currency will fall to 76 U.S. cents by the end of next year from 87.37 cents at 11:10 a.m. in Sydney.

Alpha Bank AS, Greece’s fourth largest lender, reported a steep third-quarter net loss Tuesday due to a mammoth voluntary retirement scheme, but otherwise showed an improvement in core operating trends and declining provisions for bad loans, The Wall Street Journal reported. For the three months to September, the bank said net losses totaled €156.9 million ($197 million)—better than market expectations—compared with a net profit of €361.4 million in the second quarter. A year ago, the bank reported a €255.9 million loss.

Eurozone leaders are weighing a plan to allow Greece to exit its four-year-old bailout at the end of the year by converting nearly €11bn of unused rescue funds into a backstop for Athens for when it raises cash from the markets on its own, the Financial Times reported. The plan, which will be discussed at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels on Thursday, would allow Antonis Samaras, Greek prime minister, to declare an end to the quarterly reviews by the hated “troika” of bailout monitors ahead of parliamentary elections, which could come as early as March.