Headlines

The UK has paid £1.41 billion ($1.8 billion) to lenders that issued small business loans during the Covid-19 pandemic that are now suspected of being fraudulent, Bloomberg News reported. That’s a jump from the £640 million total refunded by the end of 2022, as banks that participated in the state-guaranteed emergency support programs three years ago work through a total of £77 billion in loans. The government said Tuesday that most businesses have repaid or are paying on schedule, though banks have now received £8.5 billion for loans that have defaulted.

Brazil's annual inflation came in slightly above market expectations in mid-November but remained within striking distance of the top end of the central bank's target range, likely allowing it to deliver further interest rate cuts, Reuters reported. The IPCA-15 consumer price index stood at 4.84% in the year to mid-November, data from statistics agency IBGE showed on Tuesday, up from 4.82% at the end of last month and overshooting forecasts of 4.80% in a Reuters poll of economists.

The European Central Bank may need to take on a bigger role in supervising shadow banks as they are now bigger than conventional lenders and may be sitting on elevated risk, the outgoing head of the ECB's supervision arm told European newspapers, Reuters reported. Shadow banks, a collective term for non-bank financial firms such as insurers, hedge funds or investment funds, have grown to 51 trillion euros ($56.13 trillion) in assets, but face laxer regulation than conventional lenders, which poses a growing threat to overall financial stability.

The Financial Stability Board tweaked its ranking of the world's most important banks, a group of lenders seen as needing closer supervision and tougher rules to ensure they aren't too big to fail, the Wall Street Journal reported. Key changes in this year's list of global systemically important banks, or G-SIBs:

- Credit Suisse, the troubled Swiss bank which was acquired by domestic peer UBS earlier this year, is out. (UBS moves up by a tier, increasing its capital requirements).

- UniCredit of Italy was also removed.

Three of the world's cornerstone institutions - the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements - are to work together for the first time to "tokenise" some of the financial instruments that underpin their global work, a BIS official said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The trio will also work with Switzerland's central bank which has been pioneering tokenisation, the process of turning conventional assets into uniquely coded "tokens" that can be used in faster new systems.

Scenarios used by the financial system to assess climate risk need updating to account for growing economic uncertainty and setbacks to the green transition from the COVID-19 pandemic and Ukraine war, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. It said many governments had prioritised post-pandemic recovery over carbon emission targets while Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had caused widespread "carbon lock-in" as countries rushed to secure fossil fuel sources.

Argentine President-elect Javier Milei arrived in the U.S. on Monday for a trip to New York and Washington that will include meetings with the International Monetary Fund and Biden administration officials, as well as former President Bill Clinton, as he looks to shore up support for the nation’s crisis-torn economy, Bloomberg News reported. Milei will meet with President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and US Treasury officials, according to press offices from the US and Argentina.

Everyone has been looking for evidence of the pain in commercial property hitting banks. Behold, Switzerland's Julius Baer. The private bank Monday said it was reviewing its business of lending to rich clients after it took a hit on a 606 million Swiss franc ($680 million) exposure to a set of loans backed by a single client's commercial real estate and luxury retail holdings, the Wall Street Journal reported. It didn't name the client, but a person familiar with matter said the loans are backed by Rene Benko's troubled Austrian property group, Signa.

Vietnam’s Bamboo Airways JSC is rebuilding under its new chief executive officer, who is intent on proving the indebted six-year-old carrier has a future after shedding two-thirds of its fleet and 80% of its network, Bloomberg News reported. “We need our passengers to believe in our future,” Luong Hoai Nam said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “We need to make our investors, shareholders and potential investors believe in our future.

Austrian property group Signa could see more of its units file for insolvency as soon as this week as the real estate empire is running out of cash, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Monday, Reuters reported. The group, controlled by an Austrian magnate but whose business is anchored in Germany, held talks with Elliott Investment Management to try to raise funds, according to one of the people, describing the company's scramble for cash.