Headlines

The world's biggest economies hope to make progress this week on a plan to identify countries that put the global economy at risk, while China warned against any moves that would curb its red-hot growth, Reuters reported. The meeting of the Group of 20 rich and emerging-market nations comes at a time of conflicting economic signals. Just as signs of a strengthening recovery in some rich countries have pushed their central banks to begin to pull back on economic supports, world markets have been rocked by fears that high oil prices will put the brakes on global growth.

Mexican glass maker Vitro SAB said Monday that it won an appeal at a Mexican court and can continue with its prepackaged debt restructuring under the local equivalent of Chapter 11, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Vitro, which faces creditor opposition to its proposed restructuring, suffered a setback in January when a separate court ruled against the plan to vote $1.9 billion in intercompany debt as a way of securing sufficient creditor support for the pre-packaged restructuring proposal.

Portugal's main opposition leader, the front-runner for the prime ministerial post, said the next government should be given the chance to negotiate some of the austerity measures needed by the country, The Wall Street Journal reported. "It is important that while we guarantee necessary measures are taken in 2011, it is possible to leave some of them for the future government to negotiate, so it could reflect the strategy the Portuguese will choose in the elections," Pedro Passos Coelho said in a speech at his party's conference.

A year since Greece obtained a 110 billion euro ($158 billion) international bailout, politicians and members of the public, fed up with austerity, are pushing their government to restructure its debt, Reuters reported. The government is still strongly resisting the idea but a deep recession and rising unemployment, coupled with slow visible progress in reforming state finances, are prompting even members of the ruling socialist PASOK party to urge the leadership to reconsider.

South Korea's central bank left interest rates unchanged as expected Tuesday, opting to take stock after inflation pressures showed signs of moderating in March, but hinted afterward that it's likely to resume tightening in the coming months, The Wall Street Journal reported. The vote to keep the base rate steady at 3% was not unanimous, said Bank of Korea Governor Kim Choong-soo at a media briefing. He added that the central bank is "very determined" to keep normalizing its policy rate.

British care home operator Southern Cross Healthcare said chairman Ray Miles would be replaced with non-executive director Christopher Fisher to help the company's restructuring drive, Reuters reported. "Given that my own experience has mainly been building businesses and improving their operational performance and that the company now faces a period of intense financial restructuring, it is time to hand over to others with more experience of this," Miles said in a statement on Tuesday.

A new European Central Bank liquidity facility to help Ireland’s struggling banks is not likely “for the moment”, Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan has said. In an interview with Market News International, he also said it was too soon to say when the State could return to international bond markets for funding instead of relying on its €85 billion EU-IMF rescue package, the Irish Times reported.

The U.K.'s largest banks should hold more capital and ring-fence their retail banks from riskier investment banking operations under options laid out Monday by a government-appointed panel that are seen wiping billions of pounds off bank profits in order to protect taxpayers from future bail-outs, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Independent Commission on Banking, which has been tasked with coming up with ways to improve stability and competition in U.K.

The number of Japanese corporate bankruptcies is likely to rise after the summer on the impact from last month's devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami, a research firm said on Friday, with the effects of government spending on disaster relief expected to take some time to filter through, Reuters reported. The number of bankruptcies fell 9.9 percent in March from a year earlier to 1,183 cases, with six attributed to the impact from the quake and tsunami, Tokyo Shoko Research showed.

Takefuji Corp. said Monday that it has granted South Korean consumer lender A&P Financial Co. preferential negotiating rights to take over the failed Japanese consumer lender in what would be one of the biggest acquisitions by a South Korean firm of a Japanese company, but the unexpected development is leading bondholders and a rival bidder to question the way the lender's court administrators have handled the sale process, The Wall Street Journal reported.