Headlines

On desolate salt flats on the far outskirts of China’s sixth-largest city, dozens of enormous half-built skyscrapers stand as a monument to the excess and optimism of the Chinese real estate market, the Financial Times reported. As physical manifestations of China’s property bubble go, few examples can beat this effort to replicate Wall Street in a wasteland 40km outside Tianjin and 150km from the capital Beijing.

Argentina's default three weeks ago, and the ongoing legal battle that led up to it, raises practical, theoretical, and moral questions about the ad hoc process that ensues when a country doesn't repay its creditors, Foreign Policy reported. "We're at a moment where a lot of people have been stopped short and are asking: Is this really the way we want restructurings to go forward?" asked Mark Weidemaier, a sovereign-bond expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The majority owner of Bulgaria's troubled Corporate Commercial Bank (Corpbank) said on Monday it was working with Oman's sovereign wealth fund and other interested investors to restructure the lender, Reuters reported. Corpbank's fate has been in limbo since June, when a run on deposits prompted the central bank to seize control of it and close its operations, sparking the worst banking crisis in the poor Black Sea state since 1990s. Tsvetan Vassilev's Bromak owns just over half of Corpbank, the Balkan country's fourth-largest lender.

When President Cristina Fernández confidently praised Argentina’s financial system as “one of the most solid in the world” during a speech at the Buenos Aires stock exchange on Wednesday, some of the high-ranking executives present struggled to hide their incredulity, the Financial Times reported. Just the day before, at one point on the verge of tears, Argentina’s mercurial leader had nervously announced a plan to dodge a US court order to pay so-called “holdout” creditors in New York, after the ruling pushed the country into default last month for the second time in 13 years.

The boss of failed airline Air Australia has returned to the travel sector in a senior management role despite being banned by the corporate regulator over conduct that critics claimed wreaked "havoc" in the industry, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission last year disqualified Michael James from managing corporations for three years for failing to act with care and diligence in the lead-up to the spectacular collapse of the airline in February, 2012.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang urged the heavily scrutinised railway sector to seek more private investment and rely less on state support as a key plank of its reform, the government website said on Sunday, the International New York Times reported. Beijing has vowed to deepen reforms of its state-owned enterprises and to open up protected industries such as finance, petroleum, power, telecoms and railways to private investors for the first time.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi on Friday signaled a departure from the austerity-focused mind-set that has dominated economic policy-making in the euro zone since the onset of the region's debt crisis nearly five years ago, as officials struggle with stagnant economies, weak prices and high unemployment, The Wall Street Journal reported. Speaking at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's annual conference Jackson Hole, Wyo., Mr. Draghi said European central bankers and politicians each have a role to play in boosting demand and reducing joblessness.

Bust developer Sean Dunne is seeking to withdraw his application for bankruptcy protection in the US, Independent.ie reported. The dramatic and unexpected development came as the businessman claimed he no longer had the resources to fight efforts by NAMA to stop him emerging from the process debt free. Last year Dunne filed for bankruptcy in Connecticut, where he has lived since 2010, as creditors owed a total of €695m began to circle. However, Ulster Bank later moved to make Dunne bankrupt in Ireland and an unprecedented dual bankruptcy process has been taking place ever since.

Two companies linked to the Carl Scarpa chain of 19 women’s shoe shops, which successfully exited examinership in January, retained combined profits of €515,000 in the year to the end of that month, according to their accounts, the Irish Times reported. Cs Calzature and Carl Scarpa (Grafton Street), received debt write-offs totalling more than €2.4 million arising from the examinership, according to notes in the financial statements. A further note attached to the accounts for the Grafton Street company says it was “engaged in litigation with the landlord” of the store.

In the decade before Greece's debt crisis, businessman Aristides Belles rode a wave of acquisitions to turn his company, Nireus Aquaculture SA, into one of the largest fish farmers in the world—a staple of supermarket shelves across Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. Today, Nireus—named after an ancient Greek sea god—is awash in an ocean of debt and has become a parable for the bad loans crippling Greece's corporate sector. Most of the company's big investors have fled, profits and dividends have disappeared and Nireus shares have fallen more than 70% in the past five years.