Headlines

Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., has exited the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) restructuring process that followed its insolvency in February 2021, CBC reported. The university has continued to operate while dealing with its financial problems. Under the restructuring, it cut 76 programs in April 2021. As well, nearly 200 staff and faculty members lost their jobs. The CCAA was created for commercial enterprises to help them restructure after an insolvency.

The bankruptcy court has allowed the State Bank of India's petition seeking to initiate insolvency proceedings against Kolkata-based steelmaker Reform Ferro Cast and appointed Arun Kumar Gupta as its interim resolution professional, the Economic Times of India reported. State-owned lender SBI had approached the Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) against the steelmaker after it defaulted on its dues of about ₹267 crore.

Germany followed Spain and Belgium in reporting slower inflation, offering ammunition to those who want the European Central Bank to ease the pace of interest-rate increases, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer prices in Europe’s largest economy rose 11.3% from a year earlier in November, down from October’s 11.6% jump, the statistics office said Tuesday, citing factors including energy costs for the deceleration. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had expected an advance of 11.3%.

UK mortgage approvals fell by 10% last month, from 66,000 in September to just under 59,000, after Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget sparked chaos, Bloomberg News reported. According to the latest data from the Bank of England (BoE), this was the lowest number of approved mortgages by UK lenders since June 2020, when the property sector was hit by COVID-19 restrictions. It was also down on the 69,489 seen in October of last year. A handful of British banks pulled their mortgage deals after the mini-budget in September, while others hiked the interest rate on their offers.

Risks are piling on for Sweden’s commercial real estate sector as rising interest rates erode profitability and raise debt refinancing problems, the country’s financial supervisory authority said, Bloomberg News reported. As the Swedish central bank has responded to soaring inflation by rapidly raising interest rates, commercial property companies are facing rising costs and challenges in refinancing maturing debt.

The swelling protests against severe pandemic restrictions in China — the world’s second-largest economy — are injecting a new element of uncertainty and instability into the global economy when nations are already struggling to manage the fallout from a war in Ukraine, an energy crisis and painful inflation, the New York Times reported. For years, China has served as the world’s factory and a vital engine of global growth, and turmoil there cannot help but ripple elsewhere.

South Africa's unreliable power supply and its high level of government debt are two of the main risks to its financial stability, the country's central bank said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Africa's most developed economy has seen 170 days of rolling blackouts this year due to a maintenance backlog of state utility Eskom's ageing coal-fired power plants. This has not only hit corporate productivity but also hurt investor sentiment, the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) said in its biannual health check of the financial system.

Big Four firm KPMG LLP missed multiple red flags when it audited the financial statements of Carillion PLC, the liquidators of the defunct construction and outsourcing firm said, the Wall Street Journal reported. U.K. government officials sued KPMG seeking in January £1.3 billion—equivalent to around $1.55 billion—and claiming the audit firm failed to spot misstatements that would have led the company’s management to take different actions.

Canada's economy performed much better than expected in the third quarter, but an early indication that growth stalled in the fourth quarter could prompt the Bank of Canada next week to slow its campaign to hike interest rates, Reuters reported. Canada's economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.9% in the third quarter, above expectations, while GDP most likely was unchanged in October after a 0.1% gain in September, Statistics Canada data showed on Tuesday. Analysts surveyed by Reuters had expected third-quarter annualized growth of 1.5% and a gain of 0.1% in September.

Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron on Tuesday warned lawmakers not to interfere with monetary policy decisions, and said the "magic solutions" they proposed to blunt the impact of interest rate hikes would hurt the weakest sectors of the economy, Reuters reported. Yaron's comments appeared to be a response to the head of the Israeli parliament's powerful finance committee, Moshe Gafni, who on Monday criticised a wave of central bank interest hikes and proposed legislation to shield mortgages from rate increases.