Headlines

The Bank of Japan moved to offer Y2,000bn ($21.6bn) in overnight liquidity on Friday to “increase markets’ sense of security” because of turmoil resulting from the debt crisis in Greece, the Financial Times reported. It is the bank’s first exceptional offer of overnight funds since the scare over Dubai’s sovereign debt in December 2009 and its biggest since the height of the financial crisis in December 2008. The move shows that fears about sovereign debt default in Europe are rippling across global markets, with the Bank of Japan the first central bank to react by adding liquidity.

A third straight day of decline in world financial markets on Thursday was vivid evidence of a scary proposition: That the fiscal crisis that began in Greece months ago is spreading across Europe like a virus, causing growing doubt even about the fates of nations with far more manageable levels of government debt, The Washington Post reported. It is called the contagion effect, economists' metaphor for the rapid and hard-to-predict spread of a financial crisis, and it's driven by the fragility of investors' perceptions.

The 13-month rally in credit markets is unraveling as Europe fails to contain its debt crisis. Money markets showed banks may be the most reluctant to lend to each other in six months and a derivatives index used to protect against European bank failures soared to a record. U.S. company bond sales are poised for the slowest week this year, while in Europe they all but disappeared, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Emerging-market and mortgage bonds also tumbled.

Commercial RE Co., a Japanese real estate management company whose largest stakeholder is Goldman Sachs Group Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection today, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. The Tokyo-based developer has had to sell assets at a cheaper price, hurting its income as Japan’s real estate market deteriorated following the subprime mortgage crisis, the company said in a release to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Commercial RE had liabilities of 15 billion yen ($159.7 million) as at the end of March, according to the statement.

When big investors saw Greece falling into deep financial trouble this year, some of them turned to a familiar ally to profit from the nation's fiscal crunch: the credit default swap, The Globe and Mail reported. The swaps, often called CDS for short, are financial instruments that allow investors to place money on the risk that a company or country won't be able to pay its debts. Nowadays, they can place such bet against nearly every country, from economic powerhouses like Germany and the U.S. to those of marginal economic significance, such as El Salvador and Guatemala.

China’s biggest developers are borrowing record amounts in Hong Kong, taking advantage of lower interest rates to circumvent a lending crackdown at home, Bloomberg reported. While banks demand at least 5.2 percent in annual interest for three-to-five year money in mainland China, the cost of credit in Hong Kong dollars has fallen to the least since November 2004, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. China Overseas Land & Investment Ltd. agreed to an HK$8 billion ($1.03 billion) loan in February that pays 1.45 percent at current market levels, the data show.

Canadian pulp-and-paper company AbitibiBowater Inc. has filed a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization that proposes to pay its secured debt in full and would hand equity to its unsecured creditors, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. In a press release, AbitibiBowater said it filed the plan Tuesday with both the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., and the Quebec Superior Court in Canada, where the company's U.S. and Canadian units have each sought protection from their creditors.

Europe may need a broad cure to its debt crisis, but the increasingly awkward pairing of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund makes such action unlikely, The New York Times reported in an analysis. Just three days after a €110 billion ($134 billion) bailout of Greece was presented as the latest step to stabilize European markets, the opposite has transpired. Fears have spread through the financial markets that a larger epidemic would infect Spain, Portugal and perhaps other indebted countries outside the euro zone, like Britain and the United States.

Greece's fiscal crisis took a new turn to violence Wednesday when three people died in a firebomb attack amid a paralyzing national strike, while governments from Spain to the U.S. took steps to prevent the widening financial damage from hitting their own economies, The Wall Street Journal reported. In Spain, rival political leaders came together Wednesday with an agreement that aims to shore up shaky savings banks by the end of next month. Banks in France and Germany, which are among Greece's top creditors, pledged to support a Greek bailout by continuing to lend to the country.

A former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. executive on Tuesday disputed a central claim in Lehman's bid to recover billions of dollars from Barclays Plc, saying there was no secret $5 billion discount in the sale of Lehman's core business, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Lehman and its creditors claim that Barclays reaped a $5 billion windfall in the deal because as part of the transaction, the bank paid $45 billion in cash in exchange for $50.6 billion in securities.