Headlines

Troubled German real-estate financier Hypo Real Estate Holding AG early Wednesday reported a €3.1 billion ($3.9 billion) provisional third-quarter loss and said it had completed negotiations with the German government to receive a €50 billion liquidity facility to shore up its funding needs, the Wall Street Journal Europe reported today. A €50 billion emergency liquidity facility package organized last month for Hypo RE will become available on Nov. 13, the company said.

Seoul shares slipped 2 percent on Tuesday as demand worries following a bankruptcy filing by a major U.S. electronics retailer sent tech exporters such as LG Electronics lower, Reuters reported yesterday. Banks also fell on jitters about funding difficulties and rising bad debt. The United States is South Korea's second-biggest export market. Appliance and mobile phone maker LG Electronics dropped 6.99 percent and LG Display, a maker of flat screens for TVs and computers, declined 6.46 percent. Hynix, which produces chips used in computers and consumer electronics, fell 8.52 percent.

An international bail-out of crisis-hit Iceland appeared to be unravelling on Tuesday night as the International Monetary Fund withheld official backing for the $6 billion plan, the Financial Times reported yesterday. Iceland has also been left with a $500 million shortfall in the funds for the plan that it had hoped to raise from other international donors.

Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry S. Iswaran said Singapore's government won't bail out the casino-resort being built by Las Vegas Sands Corp. in the city-state's downtown, Bloomberg reported today. The success of Las Vegas Sands’ project is crucial for the city-state, which is counting on two casino-resorts to help double visitor arrivals and triple tourism spending by 2015. The Las Vegas casino operator said yesterday it will get a $525 million investment from the family of CEO Sheldon Adelson and plans to sell $1.62 billion more in shares to raise cash and avoid bankruptcy.

There will be a steady upward march in personal and business bankruptcy filings in Canada as overspending and falling home prices catch up with individuals and as a slowing economy hurts businesses, Reuters reported yesterday. Canada's Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy said last week that total bankruptcies in September jumped 28.4 percent from the same month a year earlier. Individual bankruptcies were up nearly 30 percent nationwide, but businesses also posted a 9 percent increase.

India is facing a threat of dwindling exports as leading world economies are heading towards a slowdown and the country's trade deficit for the current fiscal year is expected to be around $121 billion, the Economic Times reported yesterday. Indian exporters are under increasing pressure as the US, which is the single-largest export destination for Indian goods and accounted for about 13 percent of Indian exports in 2007-08, is heading for a possible slowdown.

Mail and logistics company Deutsche Post AG said it will cut 9,500 jobs and close all of its DHL express service centers in the U.S. amid heavy losses in the market there, the Wall Street Journal Europe reported today. In a statement released Monday, the German company said that new round of cuts are on top of 4,500 job cuts it already announced and blamed heavy losses at the unit, which competes with rivals UPS Inc. and FedEx Corp.

As the late-flowering globalisation of the legal industry gathers pace, lawyers' appetite for the international qualifications needed to take advantage of it is growing, the Financial Times reported today. The expansion and refinement of legal training courses mirrors the ever more sophisticated methods that law firms and companies are developing to run trans-national business deals and legal disputes. The trend is a sign of how global standards are increasingly emerging to help simplify a financial world complicated by the traditional independence of national legal systems.

As the global slowdown weakens demand for China's exports, bankruptcies and joblessness are spreading throughout southern China, a main manufacturing zone, the Wall Street Journal reported today. China's customs agency recently reported that half of China's toy exporters that it tracks--some 3,600 companies--were driven out of the market in the first seven months of this year. A majority of those were in and around Dongguan, often called the toy-making capital of the world. Higher prices for energy and raw materials have driven up costs.

Las Vegas Sands, owned by billionaire Sheldon Adelson, said it remained "committed" to its $4 billion Singapore casino project and that the city-state approved its proposal for as many as 1,000 gaming tables, the International Herald Tribune reported yesterday. The company met Singapore government officials last week to discuss completing the project, the Sands said Friday. Las Vegas Sands, which may be short of cash for $16 billion of projects in Asia, has no problems with its borrowings in Singapore, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and DBS Group, said last week. The Sands told the U.S.