Headlines

Portugal's center-right government presents its 2013 budget on Monday, which will outline the harshest measures yet under Lisbon's 78-billion-euro bailout and is likely to mark the end of the country's so far reluctant acceptance of austerity, Reuters reported.The budget will face immediate opposition from angry Portuguese, who plan to march on parliament to demand the resignation of the government and an end to austerity, which has sent Portugal into its worst recession since the 1970s.

German ship owners have called for a state bailout as the sector continues to struggle with overcapacity, rising fuel costs and hard-pressed banks pulling back from lending to the industry, Reuters reported. The global shipping crisis has hit Germany particularly hard because the euro zone's biggest economy is also home to the biggest fleet of container ships, accounting for 1,800 of the 5,000 vessels worldwide. Between 500 and 700 German-owned vessels are facing liquidity problems, an industry source said, and about 100 have already gone bust.

China's new bank loans fell last month to well below market expectations, but analysts said that other forms of credit outside the system of state-dominated lenders offset the drop, meaning companies weren't short of funding. Analysts have been looking for signs the nation's big banks are opening credit taps to boost the world's second-largest economy. Gross domestic product expansion decelerated to 7.6% in the second quarter, the slowest in more than three years, kindling concern that the world is losing one of its main buffers against global recession.

Banks bailing out money-losing Sharp Corp. to the tune of $4.6 billion may increase their management oversight of the Japanese television maker to support its return to profit, Bloomberg reported. Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd. and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. plan to send executives to Sharp, the Asahi newspaper reported yesterday. The lenders, based in Tokyo, are selecting the executives and plan to discuss the matter with the company, the newspaper reported, without saying how it obtained the information.

Two Canadian pork processors are among those expressing interest in Canada's second-biggest hog producer, Big Sky Farms, which is looking for new ownership after soaring feed costs left it unable to pay its bills, the Regina Leader-Post reported. Big Sky, which produces about one million pigs per year and is based near Humboldt, entered receivership in early September. Manitoba-based hog producer Pu-ratone Corp. is also up for sale, after entering court protection from creditors last month. Both Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods and Quebec-based Olymel L.P.

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, has crafted what he calls a “fully effective backstop” against the disintegration of the eurozone. The question now is whether Europe’s leaders will use it to push for a resolution to the region’s crisis or whether, zombie-like, the bloc stumbles through a lost decade, the Financial Times reported. The 17-nation region contracted in the second quarter and, in spite of the ECB’s actions to slash its main interest rate to a historically low 0.75 per cent, it is proving hard to reignite growth.

Greece's jobless rate topped 25 percent and its biggest company said it would quit the country on Thursday in a fresh blow to an economy that German experts warned cannot be "saved" without writing off more debt, Reuters reported. The announcement by drinks bottler Coca Cola Hellenic that it was switching its primary listing from Athens to London, and moving its corporate base to stable, low-tax Switzerland, is a bitter blow to the debt-crippled nation.

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy Thursday came under increased pressure to ask for a European Union bailout after Standard & Poor's Ratings Services slashed the country's credit rating to leave it teetering just above speculative-grade, or "junk" status, The Wall Street Journal reported.

High-level splits over the handling of the eurozone crisis burst into the open on Thursday when Germany’s finance minister rebuked the head of the International Monetary Fund after she warned that EU leaders should ease demands for tighter austerity in peripheral economies, the Financial Times reported. Wolfgang Schäuble said Christine Lagarde had appeared to contradict the IMF’s own stance in advocating an easing of austerity, noting that the fund had “time and again” warned that high debt levels threatened economic growth.

Limitless, a Dubai-based property developer, has received full agreement from its bank lenders to restructure a $1.2 billion Islamic loan, the company said on Thursday. The company has made all profit payments on the loan since signing it in 2008, Limitless said in an emailed statement, and would continue to do so under the new agreement. Limitless, which had received several maturity extensions from banks as the restructuring talks continued, didn’t say how long it was given to pay back the loan under the deal or what rates it would pay.