Headlines

Some of France’s wealthiest individuals, including the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, have called for a tax on the rich in a gesture of national solidarity as the government prepares to announce swingeing cuts to bring public finances under control, the Financial Times reported. The proposal follows a similar demand in the US from billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who earlier this month criticised the fact that his tax rate was lower than many of those who worked for him.

One of the few bright spots in real estate amid a three-year global slump, Australia now faces falling home prices and fears of overbuilding, The Wall Street Journal reported. A downturn in Australia's real estate market will add to concerns of a two-speed economy in the resource-rich nation. Mining profits are surging due to heavy demand from China and other fast-growing Asian countries, but consumer businesses and manufacturing have faltered under the weight of the swollen Australian dollar, which is trading near 30-year highs to the U.S. currency.

If our world has any place that acts like a financial early warning system, it’s South Korea. With high short-term debt levels and little to cushion it from destabilizing global events, Korea is often the first of the top 15 economies to zig, zag or hit an economic wall. At the moment, events on the ground suggest that Asia is fast running into trouble, Bloomberg reported. Korea was probably hit harder by Standard & Poor’s cut of the U.S.’s AAA credit rating than the U.S. Markets in Korea plunged, capital fled and credit-default swaps protecting public debt soared as U.S.

The euro zone's rescue plan to end its sovereign-debt crisis will weaken the foundations of the currency union and could increase states' tendency to build up debts, Germany's Bundesbank warned Monday, taking a hard stance against an agreement that German Chancellor Angela Merkel still has to persuade her government to support, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Germany said on Monday that a deal Finland struck with debt-wracked Greece for Athens to provide collateral in exchange for loan guarantees required the consent of all 17 eurozone members, Agence France-Presse reported. The agreement "must be approved by the other eurozone member countries," a finance ministry spokesman told a regular government press briefing. "Such a bilateral accord may not be agreed to the detriment of the others," he said, referring to the other countries coming to the aid of Greece.

Italy, under pressure from financial markets and the European Central Bank to overhaul its economy, is trying to tackle one of its most persistent economic flaws: the lack of opportunities for young people, The Wall Street Journal reported. Italy's Parliament is due to start debating a package of reforms aimed at speeding up growth in late August that includes a tentative move to relax layoff rules. That, the government hopes, will encourage business to take more risks on hiring new, young workers.

Plowing ahead with plans to return the company to the stock market by the end of the next fiscal year, the head of Japan Airlines Corp. said Monday its low-cost joint venture can learn from--and avoid--painful mistakes made by other well-established U.S. and European carriers in past attempts to tap into the budget travel market, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. But JAL President Masaru Onishi said the Japanese government needs to do its part too.

The most recently available figures from the Central Bank note almost 50,000 mortgages were in arrears for more than three months last March. The majority of them were over six months behind in their payments, the Irish Times reported. Even allowing for no increase in the rate of people falling into arrears, it is likely that by the end of September this number will have exceeded 60,000, and this doesn’t include those people who have agreed some form of restructuring with their lender. Meanwhile, property prices continue to fall, putting more homeowners into negative equity.

Bondholders of bankrupt Czech lottery firm Sazka are demanding changes to its sale conditions, which they say will put off buyers and therefore won't maximise returns, the investors' law firm said on Monday. Dewey & LeBoeuf said it represented investors holding more than 25 percent of Sazka's outstanding 195 million secured amortising bond due in 2021.

Greece’s four largest banks agreed to take up a €50m convertible bond to help recapitalise Proton Bank, a small lender, the central bank announced this weekend, in what is being seen as an attempt to avert a run on the country’s fragile banking system, the Financial Times reported. The deal came ahead of an expected announcement this week that several Athens lenders plan to seek emergency liquidity assistance from the Greek central bank, senior bankers said.