Headlines

A bet on China's banks is a bet on Beijing's political decisions, The Wall Street Journal Heard on the Street blog reported. That was underlined late Monday when Central Huijin Investment, the domestic arm of the country's sovereign-wealth fund, waded into the markets to buy shares in the big four banks: Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, and China Construction Bank. Huijin said it would buy more shares over the next 12 months. The bank stocks got a boost, as did a previously sagging market overall.

Greece is likely to receive an €8 billion aid tranche it needs to stave off bankruptcy in early November, EU, IMF and ECB inspectors said in a joint statement today, the Irish Times reported. The statement came after the troika concluded its week-long review of the country's finances. In the statement, the troika said the Greek recession will be deeper than was anticipated in June and a recovery is now expected only from 2013 onwards.

Sovereign bonds were once considered among the safest of all investments. Yet with Greece teetering and several more euro-zone countries on the watch list, the Continent's banks are in trouble. The European Union is struggling to come up with an antidote, Spiegel Online reported. Three years after the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008, the euro crisis is heading toward a new peak.

Uchumi Supermarkets Ltd., which resumed trading in May after a five-year suspension, advanced for the first day in as sell-offs by long-time shareholders slowed down, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “We have seen the tail-end of the selling pressure of the people who are selling after holding the stock for so long,” Aly-Khan Satchu, chief executive officer of Rich Management, a Nairobi-based investment adviser to high-net-worth individuals, said in a phone interview today.

Pub owner National Leisure & Gaming, which operates 35 hotels in New South Wales and Queensland, has blamed "onerous leases" for its collapse and handed receivers the daunting prospect of trying to recover more than $150 million in debt, SmartCompany.com.au reported. NLG, which operated well-known venues including The Brewhouse at Belmore, Bridgeview Hotel at Willoughby, Bankstown Club Hotel and Hermit Park in Townsville, has been teetering on the brink of collapse for the best part of 12 months, and called Ian England and Guy Edwards of PricewaterhouseCoopers as administrators on Friday.

Europe's banks expect to be told to raise more capital under a Franco-German effort to solve the euro zone debt crisis after the state rescue of Franco-Belgian lender Dexia SA, Reuters reported. Dexia agreed to the nationalisation of its Belgian retail bank and secured 90 billion euros (£78.4 billion) in state guarantees, in a rescue that raises pressure on other euro zone countries to strengthen their banks.

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy announced Monday that the upcoming summit of European Union and euro-zone heads of state will be postponed by a week until October 23, in a move signaling that the region's leaders are struggling to come up with a comprehensive crisis response, The Wall Street Journal reported. The summits were originally supposed to happen back-to-back next week, with EU leaders gathering on October 17 and euro-zone heads of government picking up the baton on October 18.

Hopes of securing agreement on reforms to the eurozone's bailout package will go down to the wire on Tuesday after the warring partners in Slovakia's ruling coalition failed to reach a deal on approving the plans, Guardian.co.uk reported. Despite threatening to quit if there was no compromise, prime minister Iveta Radicova will resume talks with her coalition partners ahead of the planned vote on expanding the powers of the euro's safety net in parliament later on Tuesday.

New bankruptcy provisions reducing the period of applying for discharge from bankruptcy from 12 to five years and providing for the automatic discharge of bankruptcy after 12 years have been commenced by the Minister for Justice, the Irish Times reported. Alan Shatter announced that the new measures, contained in the Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2011, came into force Monday. Other, mainly technical, improvements in bankruptcy law have been in force since the beginning of August.

The National Asset Management Agency, Ireland's state-run "bad bank", has put two loan portfolios worth a total of 800 million euros ($1.1 billion) on the market, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday. The source told Reuters that NAMA was being advised by property consultancy Savills on the disposal of about 200 million euros of loans that had been made to housing and hotel developer Donal Mulryan. Separately, real estate consultancy CBRE was marketing about 600 million euros worth of loans to property developer Cyril Dennis. NAMA, CBRE and Savills all declined to comment.