Headlines

The steepening downturn in China’s real-estate markets has led China Evergrande to scrap a $35 billion debt-restructuring plan designed to ensure the property developer’s survival, a sign that China’s ongoing housing crisis could still get worse, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. China Evergrande, among the largest property developers in China, popped the country’s real-estate bubble in 2021 when it spiraled into insolvency and set off a chain of developer defaults.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese investors are confronting a distressing reality: Their investments with Zhongzhi Enterprise Group, a financial giant managing $140 billion in assets, and its trust banking arm, Zhongrong, might be at risk, the New York Times reported. Starting in July, companies affiliated with Zhongzhi missed dozens of payments to investors. They have offered no timetable for when people will be paid, fueling concerns that one of China’s largest so-called shadow banks may be near collapse.

China has limited room for further monetary policy easing, and it should pursue structural reforms such as encouraging entrepreneurs rather than counting on macroeconomic policies to revive growth, a central bank adviser said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Liu Shijin, a member of the People's Bank of China's (PBOC) monetary policy committee, told a financial forum in Shanghai that Beijing's room for monetary policy easing was limited by widening interest rate differentials with the U.S. Fiscally, Chinese governments at various levels are under stress, he told the annual Bund Summit conference.

BCC has filed for bankruptcy and the administrators of the electronics chain informed its employees on Thursday morning, NL Times reported. The court granted BCC a deferment of payment last week. The electronics chain has 58 stores, an online shop, and around 1,300 employees. If the court declares BCC bankrupt, the bankruptcy administrators can start working on a possible restart, potentially saving some of the jobs. The electronics chain has been struggling with financial problems.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony said Thursday that it had filed for bankruptcy just days after canceling its 2023-24 season, leaving dozens of musicians and staff facing an uncertain future, the Global and Mail reported. The 78-year-old Southern Ontario symphony said earlier this week that it needed to raise $2-million immediately in order to keep operating, acknowledging that insolvency was a possible outcome. The organization confirmed it had filed for bankruptcy in a press release late Thursday afternoon.

Bank of Japan Gov. Kazuo Ueda, defying speculation about a near-term rise in interest rates, said Japan couldn’t yet be confident of sustainable inflation backed by strong wage growth, although prices are currently rising faster than the central bank’s 2% target, the Wall Street Journal reported. He said he planned to keep a benchmark short-term interest rate in negative territory for now—the same place it has been since 2016.

Mexico's headline inflation eased in the first half of September, official data showed on Friday, with the president calling on the central bank to focus on promoting economic growth given the improving inflation data, Reuters reported. Headline inflation in Latin America's second-largest economy hit 4.44% in the 12 months through early September, down from 4.64% at the end of August, data from statistics agency INEGI showed.

Struggling Swedish landlord SBB took a major step toward stabilizing its finances after agreeing to sell a further stake in a portfolio of school buildings to Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Bloomberg News reported. Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget i Norden AB — as the company is officially known — agreed to sell 1.16% holding in the education division to Brookfield, making the Canadian investor the majority shareholder after it already owned 49% of the unit called SBB EduCo AB.

Canadian consumers appear to be quickly rolling back their spending as the Bank of Canada’s higher interest rates start to bite into more household budgets, Bloomberg News reported. Receipts for retailers dropped 0.3% in August, the first decline since March, according to an advance estimate from Statistics Canada released Friday. That followed a 0.3% increase a month earlier, which missed the median estimate of 0.4% in a Bloomberg survey. Sales rose in seven of the nine subsectors in July, and were led by increases at food and beverage retailers.

Canadian autoworkers ratified a new labor agreement with Ford Motor Co. on Sunday, averting a threatened strike and potentially setting a precedent that could play out in the United Auto Workers' strike at automaker facilities in the U.S., the Associated Press reported. The new agreement raises base hourly pay for production workers by almost 20% over three years, and by more than 25% for trade workers, the Canadian autoworker union Unifor said. It also gives permanent workers a $10,000 bonus and adds a cost-of-living adjustment, a mechanism that adjusts wages in line with inflation.