Headlines

Sri Lanka struck a deal to restructure $12.6 billion of bonds with its creditors, bringing the South Asian nation closer to completing its debt overhaul two years after it defaulted, Bloomberg reported. Investors agreed to take a 28% nominal reduction on the bonds’ principal, according to a statement released Wednesday at the conclusion of the second round of talks. The deal included the issuance of notes whose payouts are linked to economic growth and a potential governance-linked bond.

Since time immemorial, the world of technology has continued to evolve, throwing up exciting innovations, ideas, and happenings that keep the tech scene buzzing, and one cryptocurrency that does not cease to amaze everyone is Bitcoin, The National Somaliland reported. Recently, Bitcoin saw a whopping 10,000% price spike. Consequently, creditors of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange, Mt. Gox, are reaping enormous windfalls from their claims in the Bitcoin bankruptcy estate. For those not familiar with the Mt. Gox saga, it was formerly the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange.

Many business owners in Japan are struggling to find enough workers to stay afloat, NHK World reported. The number declaring bankruptcy as a result was at a record high in the first half of this year. Private research firm Teikoku Databank says Japan's labor shortage drove 182 companies to the wall between January and June. The number was up by 72 from a year earlier. It's the highest figure since the firm started keeping track. Fifty-three of the businesses were in the construction industry, and 27 were in logistics.

The saga of green-tech darling Nexii Building Solutions has ended with a court-approved bankruptcy sale of the company and its debts to two Americans, BIV reported. According to a BC Supreme Court approval and vesting order, Nexii Building Solutions and its subsidiaries have been sold to Nexiican Holdings Inc. and Nexii Inc. for $500,000 and assumption of more than $20 million in debt obligations. The principals of the two acquiring entities are Blake Beckham, a lawyer with Beckham Portela in Dallas, Texas, and director for Nexiican Holdings; and Russ Lambert, president of Nexii Inc.

A severe labor shortage and rising prices are weighing heavily on Japan's nursing care providers, with 81 nursing homes going bankrupt over the past six months, a Tokyo-based research center has said, the Japan Times reported. This is the highest number recorded for the first half of the year since the nursing care insurance system started in 2000. It also marked a 50% increase from the same period of last year, Tokyo Shoko Research said. Previously, the highest number of bankruptcies recorded was 58 in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The European Union gave Deutsche Lufthansa its conditional approval to buy a minority stake in ITA Airways, the Italian carrier formerly known as Alitalia, bolstering the German carrier group’s reach in Europe and its exposure to the lucrative Italian market, the Wall Street Journal reported. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said its approval was conditional upon full compliance with remedies offered by Lufthansa and Italy’s economy and finance ministry to address concerns from competition officials over the deal’s impact on short- and long-haul routes.

Swiss inflation unexpectedly eased — offering reassurance to Swiss National Bank officials who’ve lowered borrowing costs for two straight meetings, Bloomberg reported. Consumer prices rose 1.3% from a year ago in June, the statistics office said Thursday. That’s less than economists estimated and down from May’s 1.4%, which was the fastest clip this year. The slowdown was helped by a 0.2% annual decline in the cost of goods, while services were up 2.4%. Core inflation also moderated to 1.1%, defying expectations for it to quicken.

A new study has revealed that almost two-thirds of football clubs in the top two divisions of Japan's Professional Football League, also known as the J-League, could be at risk of bankruptcy, Phys.org reported. The work is published in the Journal of Applied Accounting Research. The research, conducted by sports finance and economics experts from the University of Portsmouth and Sheffield Hallam University, found widespread financial issues across both the J1 and J2 leagues, with approximately 50 to 75% of the clubs at risk.

Governments owe an unprecedented $91 trillion, an amount almost equal to the size of the global economy and one that will ultimately exact a heavy toll on their populations, CNN reported. Debt burdens have grown so large — in part because of the cost of the pandemic — that they now pose a growing threat to living standards even in rich economies, including the U.S. Yet, in a year of elections around the world, politicians are largely ignoring the problem, unwilling to level with voters about the tax increases and spending cuts needed to tackle the deluge of borrowing.

Four months ago, China’s leaders announced what seemed like a straightforward and proven plan to recharge the economy: Subsidize consumers who want to replace old cars and household appliances, the New York Times reported. The early results are not promising. Only 113,000 cars qualified for trade-in subsidies through June 25 — a blip in a country where monthly sales exceed 2 million cars. And buyers of new appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators are being offered discounts of only about 10 percent, depending on what city they live in.