Headlines

Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) said that it will hire 32 officials to help tighten oversight of illegal trading at securities firms and other regulations as it boosts its headcount and budget for next year, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The regulator plans to increase its net headcount to 1,548 people in 2012, the most in at least in five years, as its budget grows by 4.1 percent to 23.1 billion yen ($296 million), the agency said. The FSA penalized at least 35 financial institutions this year, including Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG, for breaching Japanese securities rules.

Bharati Shipyard Ltd. said its board has approved restructuring INR28.54 billion ($538.2 million) of its INR32.50 billion debt, a move that will help it cut interest costs, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The company has been struggling with mounting debt on its books after acquiring a majority stake in Great Offshore Ltd. two years ago, as a slowdown in Europe and lower demand in India also impacted its business.

India's lower house of Parliament passed a historic anticorruption bill yesterday, 42 years after one was first demanded, regaining the initiative in a months-long national debate over the pervasiveness of graft, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The bill will have to be passed by the upper house to become law, but it upsets the dynamics of a bitter battle that has played out in the past year between the government and anticorruption activist Anna Hazare.

Natural and organic bedding producer Natura World said yesterday that it has filed a notice of intention to restructure its business under Canada's Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, and has reached an agreement with its lender to provide C$7.8 million in new financing, FurnitureToday.com reported yesterday. The company said that the financing from Callidus Capital of Toronto will create an opportunity for Natura to solidify its position as a natural and organic sleep products brand. The company said there will be no disruption of service to its customers, vendors or suppliers.

Turkey's central bank will try to make its actions more predictable next year while sticking to a monetary policy that gives it "wide freedom of action," Governor Erdem Basci said, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The governor surprised markets this year with a rate cut in August, followed by the introduction of an "interest rate corridor" in October within which policymakers can set interest rates on a daily basis. They immediately used the corridor to tighten policy. Inflation may end this year at more than 10 percent, compared to a target of 5.5 percent, he said.

The Japanese and Indian governments agreed Wednesday to set up a three-year, $15 billion bilateral-currency swap line in an effort to buttress their economies against Europe's sovereign debt crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The new swap line - five times that of the previous arrangement that expired in early summer - follows a Japan-South Korea deal in October to boost their bilateral swap pact to $70 billion from $13 billion. The moves signal spreading doubts among Asian economic powerhouses about the ability of European leaders to fix their problems anytime soon.

Even after the European Central Bank doled out nearly half a trillion euros of loans to cash-strapped banks last week, fears about potential financial problems are still stalking the sector. One big reason: concerns about collateral, according to today's Wall Street Journal. The only way European banks can now convince anyone - institutional investors, fellow banks or the ECB - to lend them money is if they pledge high-quality assets as collateral.

Financial market pressure on Italy eased temporarily on Wednesday, with borrowing rates on some government-issued debt dropping by half. But the political pressure on the government of Prime Minister Mario Monti remained high — and was rising, the New York Times reported Wednesday. Last week, Mr. Monti won final approval of a $40 billion spending package that includes tax increases and a pension change aimed at eliminating Italy's budget deficit by 2013.

The trustee for the MF Global Inc. brokerage said he's disputing as much as $700 million in customer assets with the administrators of a U.K. affiliate, Business Week reported Wednesday. Trustee James Giddens, who has said he's trying to retrieve U.S. commodity customers' assets from foreign affiliates, told the administrators the funds were held for customers' foreign trades and should be returned, he said in a statement. The administrators said the assets didn't fit the classification of segregated funds under U.K. law, he said. The assets he's fighting for in the U.K.

The "bleak" financial situation faced by the younger generation has been laid bare, as official figures showed that more people aged between 25 and 34 are turning to a type of insolvency known as a debt relief order (DRO) than any other age group, the Sunday Sun reported today. One in four people who have taken out DROs in England and Wales since they were introduced fall into this age category, according to the Insolvency Service, which has launched a Dealing With Your Debt campaign encouraging people to seek help early.