Headlines

The euro zone's sinking commercial property sector could struggle for years, the European Central Bank said on Tuesday, posing a threat to the banks and investors which financed it, Reuters reported. An ECB report which examines threats to financial stability underscored heightened concern over a property boom that is now unravelling in countries such as Germany and Sweden. Commercial property prices have been hit by economic weakness and high interest rates over the last year, challenging the sector's profitability and business model, the ECB said.

The German government has imposed a freeze on most new spending commitments in what officials on Tuesday said was a necessary step as Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition grapples with a deepening budget crisis, Reuters reported. The government's spending plans were thrown into disarray by a court ruling last week that blocked the government from transferring 60 billion euros ($65 billion) in unused funds from the pandemic towards green initiatives and could starve some German industry of support to keep it competitive in a weak economy.

Transferring back money from Germany's Climate Transformation fund after a top court ruling causes a chain reaction, as the now-cancelled 60-billion-euro in funds leverage far more capital, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. "These funds are not an add-on that one can carelessly do without ... the loss to the economy if investments were not made now would be even greater," Habeck told a news conference in the city of Jena. The government was now preparing and discussing at high speed how to set up its budget in light of the ruling and the missing funds.

Poland is set to receive more than 5 billion euros ($5.5 billion) in EU funds after the European Commission gave a positive assessment Tuesday of the country's revised recovery plan that includes green reforms and investments, the Associated Press reported. The 5.1 billion euros pre-financing is part of the bloc's REPowerEU program aimed at helping the 27 EU nations recover from the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, and reduce their dependance to Russian fossil fuels.

Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist president-elect is right that the country desperately needs dollars. But his economic plan for getting them may be the wrong one, the Wall Street Journal reported. Javier Milei’s victory over Economy Minister Sergio Massa in Sunday’s presidential election showed how eager Argentines are to embrace change. The economy is in tatters, with inflation running at 143%.

Consumer prices in Canada rose at the slowest pace since June, a reassuring sign for central bank policymakers that rates are now high enough to significantly cool inflation pressures, Bloomberg News reported. The consumer price index increased 3.1% in October from a year ago, following a 3.8% increase in September, Statistics Canada reported Tuesday in Ottawa. That matched the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The deceleration was largely a result of lower prices for gasoline, while the largest contributors to the increase remain mortgage interest cost, groceries and rent.

After several years of persistently low commodity prices driving a wave of corporate insolvencies, bankruptcy professionals in Alberta say that it's become increasingly rare to see these companies fail, CBC.ca reported. The financial rebound is providing relief for the province's orphaned-well problem. Fewer companies becoming insolvent means fewer companies abandoning their assets, which can become environmental and safety hazards. When a single company fails, it can result in thousands of oil and gas wells, in addition to hundreds of facilities and pipelines, that no longer have an owner.

The coming holiday season could be as good as it gets for strongly performing U.K. retail stocks, according to Deutsche Bank AG, Bloomberg News reported. “Christmas trading is likely to be robust, in our view, but there is a risk this represents the last hurrah of post-pandemic spending recovery,” analyst Adam Cochrane wrote in a note. U.K. retailers are headed for their best year since 2019, with an index for the sector up 24%, boosted by the return of shoppers to physical stores following the end of pandemic-era restrictions.

State-owned Russian Agricultural Bank has filed a lawsuit against JP Morgan in a Moscow court, court files showed on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The document gave no information on the nature of the claim and neither of the two lenders replied to a request for comment. The court is yet to start processing the lawsuit filed on Nov. 20. Russian Agricultural Bank, the main financial intermediary for Russian food and fertiliser exports, has been hit by Western sanctions and disconnected from the SWIFT international payment system.

The European Commission on Monday said it would extend a loosening of state aid rules by three more months than initially planned, to end June 2024, to allow EU countries to compensate companies for high energy prices resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East, Reuters reported. The EU executive relaxed its state aid rules in March last year after thousands of companies were hit by the war in Ukraine, saying the easier regime would end in December this year.