Headlines

Begbies Traynor has warned that insolvency activity will remain “elevated” into 2025 despite improvement in the wider economy, PA Media reported. The Manchester-based restructuring firm said that higher interest rates and funding challenges in certain sectors will result in further companies going bust or requiring an overhaul. The company, listed on London’s AIM junior market, reported strong revenue and earnings growth over the past year. Group revenues increased by 12% to £136.7 million for the year to April 30.

New governments in Europe are being handed a poisoned chalice. They are being elected with mandates for change, but only limited means at their disposal to enact it, according to a Wall Street Journal commentary. Public debt is close to multidecade highs on both sides of the English Channel, where voters this week were electing new parliaments. In both France and the U.K., government spending and budget deficits as a share of gross domestic product are significantly above prepandemic levels.

Mexico’s inflation accelerated more than expected in June, complicating central bank’s efforts to cut interest rates that remain near an all-time high, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer prices rose 4.98% from a year earlier, above the 4.87% median estimate of analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Core inflation, a metric that strips out volatile components and that the Mexican central bank watches closely, slowed to 4.13%, slightly below the 4.14% median estimate.

Brazil’s top decision-maker on currency intervention signaled he wouldn’t pull the trigger on any move to stem this year’s rout in the real without obtaining full support from the central bank board, Bloomberg News reported. Gabriel Galipolo told investors in private meetings this month he would seek consensus from fellow bank directors before taking action in the foreign exchange market, according to four participants of those gatherings.

Colombian inflation accelerated for the first time in 15 months in a setback for the government which wants faster interest rate cuts to revive economic growth, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer prices rose 7.18% in June from a year earlier, the statistics agency said Monday, from 7.16% in May. Prices roses 0.32% from a month earlier, slightly higher than the 0.30% median forecast of 25 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. One measure of core inflation closely tracked by the central bank, which excludes volatile food prices, slowed to 7.64%% from a year earlier.

Unemployment rates are set to pick up only slightly across the world’s rich countries in the short term, while real wages will continue to rise as profit growth cools, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. In its annual report on the jobs market, the Paris-based policy advisory body said wages have been rising faster than prices over the past year, but real wages remain below their late 2019 levels in a number of countries, including the U.S.

A solar panel maker in Georgia that has booked $230 million in federal tax credits stands to collect hundreds of millions more as it pursues plans to create the first end-to-end solar manufacturing chain in the US, easing reliance on China and related concerns about the use of forced labor, Bloomberg News reported. But at least through the end of this year, the Qcells solar plant, which South Korea’s Hanwha Solutions Corp. opened in Dalton, Georgia, in 2019 and almost doubled in capacity last year, is making panels with base components from China.

An Austrian court has thrown a wrench in attempts to restructure Signa Prime Selection AG, saying a creditor-backed plan to sell property held by Rene Benko’s flagship unit was “obviously not feasible,” Bloomberg News reported. The Vienna Higher Regional Court’s decision — which can be appealed — overruled an earlier approval of the plan, which envisions a protracted wind-down of the company under the supervision of a trustee.

China’s central bank has signed agreements with major brokers to borrow “hundreds of billions” of yuan worth of government bonds, a move analysts say is likely aimed at stabilizing plummeting long-term bond yields, the Wall Street Journal reported. The People’s Bank of China has started to borrow medium and long-term notes from lenders, state media said Friday, now holds “hundreds of billions” of yuan worth of bonds. The central bank will borrow the bonds with no fixed term on an open-ended basis and sell them depending on market conditions, state media added.

Hungary’s stocks and currency fell after Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government again resorted to its tactic of imposing special taxes on banks and other industries to plug gaps in its budget, Bloomberg News reported. It plans to keep current levels of windfall taxes on banks, energy and foreign-owned companies, despite earlier promises to lower them, Cabinet Minister Gergely Gulyas said on Monday. He said the measures would net the budget an additional 400 billion forint ($1.1 billion).