Headlines

The number of companies in England and Wales declared insolvent in November was 21% higher than a year earlier, government figures showed on Friday, adding to the pattern of higher corporate failures as the Bank of England raises interest rates, Reuters reported. The Insolvency Service, a public body, said there were 2,466 registered company insolvencies during the month. The BoE raised rates 14 times between December 2021 and August this year, taking Bank Rate from 0.1% to 5.25%.

Ministers will announce a 6.5% increase in the funding for local councils in England in a desperate attempt to stop them going bankrupt, the Guardian reported. Michael Gove, the communities secretary, will announce the £64bn support package on Monday, less than a fortnight after he was warned that an unprecedented number of councils are likely to declare themselves bankrupt.

Another Indian airline backed by a billionaire is on the brink of shutting down for good, having tried and so far failed to attract a savior after entering bankruptcy protection in May, Bloomberg News reported. Go Airlines India Ltd.’s chances are fading. Chief Executive Officer Kaushik Khona quit at the end of November, saying he couldn’t get the carrier flying again and that staff hadn’t been paid for six months. Go flight attendants and pilots are looking for jobs elsewhere. On Friday, Go announced in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that it had canceled all scheduled flights until Feb.

A plan to prevent another developing-country debt crisis is now at the root of the latest financial troubles destabilizing economies from Ghana to Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the Wall Street Journal reported. Scarred by the Latin American and Asian crises of the 1980s and 1990s, when dollar-denominated loans forced dozens of countries to default or restructure their debts, a wave of economists pushed a plan to remake low-income countries in the image of richer ones.

Ethiopia's government told bondholders on Thursday it was hoping to negotiate a rework of its single international bond quickly and was set to include a form of "loss reinstatement" provision for investors, three sources attending the call told Reuters. The global investor call was part of Ethiopia's eleventh hour push to resuscitate an overhaul of its $1 billion Eurobond after disclosing on Dec. 8 that it failed to reach an agreement with a core group of bondholders.

China's State Council, led by Premier Li Qiang, on Sunday published rules that come into force on May 1 for the supervision and management of non-banking payment institutions, Reuters reported. The rules, among other measures, implement tougher licensing regulations and call for stronger risk management of non-bank payment platforms to prevent misappropriation of funds and other criminal activities, People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, and the Ministry of Justice said in a joint statement on Sunday.

China's property sector worsened in November as negative home buyer sentiment and indebted developers drove down sales and investment, while broader retail sector activity missed forecasts, suggesting more support is needed to shore up demand, Reuters reported. The world's second-largest economy has struggled to mount a strong post-COVID recovery as distress in the housing market, local government debt risks and weakening global demand slowed momentum.

The Bank of Mexico's five-member board unanimously held the key interest rate at 11.25% for a sixth straight monetary policy meeting on Thursday, as expected, saying progress on slowing inflation had been made even as the outlook remained challenging, Reuters reported. Banxico, as the bank is known, repeated previous guidance that it would need to maintain the benchmark rate at its current level "for some time" in order to bring inflation to its 3% target, plus or minus one percentage point.

Argentina’s radical, anarcho-capitalist President Javier Milei may turn out to be pretty conventional. That comes with good and bad news for investors, the Wall Street Journal reported. Late on Tuesday, the country’s new government announced its first set of economic measures since Milei was sworn in. Economy Minister Luis Caputo said the peso’s official exchange rate against the U.S. dollar would be roughly halved and that public spending would be drastically reduced by cutting energy and transportation subsidies, canceling public works and reducing transfers to provinces.

Sweden’s core inflation hit the lowest level since May last year, reinforcing a brighter view on price increases after the country’s central bank halted an 18-month campaign of interest-rate hikes last month, Bloomberg News reported. Prices excluding energy and interest-rate changes rose by 5.4% from a year earlier, a release from Statistics Sweden showed Thursday. That was clearly lower than the 5.9% expected by both the Riksbank and economists in a Bloomberg survey.