Headlines

Brazil has gone from being a motor of the world economy as one of the fast-growing so-called Bric nations to the sick man of the large emerging markets, the Financial Times reported. Unemployment is soaring, business confidence plummeting. Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, is considering cutting its investment grade rating to junk. The country is breaking records in all the wrong ways.

Since the collapse last year of Mt. Gox, the exchange that served as the largest hub for storing and trading the virtual currency Bitcoin, law enforcement officials and angry clients have been asking what happened to nearly half a billion dollars in Bitcoins that the company said had vanished from its computer systems.

A unit of Indonesian coal miner PT Berau Coal Energy Tbk has filed a petition to have a debt moratorium granted by a Singapore court recognized in the United States, in a move to stave off creditors, Reuters reported. On July 7, the Singapore High Court imposed a moratorium preventing any creditor of Berau Capital Resources Pte Ltd from enforcing its rights against Berau Capital, its parent company or the guarantors of Berau Capital's $450 million bond. The moratorium, which lasts until Jan. 4, effectively bought time for Berau to negotiate with bondholders.

Oil producer Afren Plc said its board had decided to put the company into administration as it failed to secure support for a vital refinancing and restructuring plan, Reuters reported. Afren said earlier this month talks with bondholders, banks and its partners were scuppered after the company cut its production forecast for the year earlier this month. Its shares were suspended on the same day.

Hundreds of thousands of mortgage holders are set to lose a key tax relief on their monthly repayments, the Irish Times reported. According to figures provided by Minister for Finance Michael Noonan, some 325,000 mortgage holders will lose the relief, which is €850 per annum on average, when it is phased out by the end of 2017. The relief on mortgage interest expired in 2009 for people who started paying their mortgage in 2003 or earlier, while those who took out a mortage between January 2004 and the end of december 2012 the entitlement for relief ends on December 31st, 2017.

The International Monetary Fund’s board has been told Athens’ high debt levels and poor record of implementing reforms disqualify Greece from a third IMF bailout of the country, raising new questions over whether the fund will join the EU’s latest financial rescue, the Financial Times reported. The determination, presented by IMF staff at a two-hour board meeting on Wednesday, means that while IMF staff will participate in bailout negotiations currently under way in Athens, the fund will not decide whether to agree a new programme for months — potentially into next year.

Long drawn-out negotiations between Ukraine and the major investors who own its debt are finally starting to thaw, The Wall Street Journal reported. After months of relative stalemate, a group of the conflict-torn country’s creditors has indicated it is willing to take a small reduction in the face value of Ukrainian bonds to speed up a debt restructuring process, according to two people close to the negotiations.

Some of the world’s largest companies have sounded the alarm about the slowdown in the Chinese economy, warning that weaker growth would hit profits in the second half of the year, the Financial Times reported. Car companies such as PSA Peugeot Citroën, Audi and Ford have slashed growth forecasts while industrial goods groups such as Caterpillar and Siemens have all spoken out on the negative impact of China.

Mexico, a middle-income but highly unequal country, is betting on sweeping structural reforms to catapult it into the big league of advanced economies. But it is not winning the battle against poverty and has not been for the past quarter of a century, despite economic growth and its membership of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). That is the stark conclusion to be drawn from a new bi-annual report from Coneval, a Mexican government agency charged with evaluating social policies.

British regulators said on Thursday that they had barred a former trader at the Dutch lender Rabobank from the securities industry after he pleaded guilty in the United States in March in connection with rigging a global benchmark interest rate, the International New York Times reported. The Financial Conduct Authority of Britain said the former trader, Lee Stewart, 52, had been barred from working in the British financial services industry for lacking “honesty and integrity.” The ban was put in place on July 21, the regulator said. In March, Mr.