Headlines

China has helped to pull countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development back toward economic recovery, but the path to sustained growth will be bumpy, the association said Thursday in a cautious assessment of the global economy, The New York Times reported. While the world economy has come back from the edge of the abyss at which it stood early in the year, the O.E.C.D. said, efforts to repay debts by households, banks, companies “and, eventually, governments” will keep downward pressure on economic growth.

Finance company Boston Finance, one of the many currently in a moratorium, has been finally put into receivership, The New Zealand Herald reported. Grant Graham and Brendon Gibson of KordaMentha have been appointed receivers, formally ending its moratorium arrangement which has been in place since March last year. Today's move was widely expected.

The liquidator of failed telecommunications company One.Tel will consider legal action against former directors James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch after a NSW Supreme Court judge found the One.Tel founder and chief executive Jodee Rich did not mislead directors about the state of the company's finances three months before it collapsed.

The U.K. government is likely to have to borrow even more than it planned this fiscal year, making the scale of the tax rises and spending cuts that will be needed to reduce its debt to manageable levels even greater, The Wall Street Journal reported. And in order to ensure that those efforts to hold onto the U.K.'s triple-A credit rating don't derail the hoped for economic recovery, the Bank of England is likely to keep its key interest rate at a record low for longer than other leading central banks.

Troubled Canadian retailer Cotton Ginny Inc, with over 120 stores, has filed for bankruptcy, less than one year after it emerged from creditor protection, Fibre2fashion.com reported. The latest bankruptcy filing, dated Nov. 2, lists the company's total liabilities at $22.5 million. No assets are listed. Cotton Ginny is run by Tony Chahine, who also goes by the name Antoine Chahine Badr. The clothing firm again filed under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, known as CCAA, in February 2008.

A Halifax company that offered week-long sailing cruises in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and the Caribbean has ceased operations due to a cash shortage. Canadian Sailing Expeditions, which has been under protection from its creditors since June 2008, stopped doing business on Friday, The Chronicle Herald reported. “We basically ran out of money to continue to operate Canadian Sailing Expeditions. We can’t really do anything about that," Doug Prothero, one of the principals of the company, said Tuesday during a phone interview.

Cell phone handset maker Sony Ericsson will move its North American headquarters from North Carolina to Atlanta and close a half-dozen sites worldwide as it retrenches against what it expects will be a tighter market and cuts about 1,600 jobs globally, The Associated Press reported. The joint venture between Sweden's LM Ericsson and Japan's Sony Corp. will consolidate product development operations by closing sites in Research Triangle Park; Seattle; Miami; San Diego; Kista, Sweden; and Chennai, India, spokeswoman Stacy Doster said.

Shares in Japan Airlines slid to a record low after the transport minister rattled investors by saying bankruptcy was still a possibility, even as U.S. carriers lined up with offers of financial support, Reuters reported. Delta Air Lines said it and partners in the SkyTeam alliance were ready to offer $1 billion, including a $500 million equity investment, in return for JAL defecting from the Oneworld alliance and its partnership with American Airlines. The offer follows news last week that private equity firm TPG was considering partnering with American Airlines on an investment in JAL.

European bankers on Tuesday warned that excessive regulation in response to the global financial crisis would endanger growth in the real economy, although some international officials insisted tougher rules and an end to taxpayer-funded bank bail-outs remained essential for recovery, the Financial Times reported. Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, said there was a “real danger” that doctrinaire policy and demands that banks hold more capital could have perverse effects on the economy and society.

A pioneering biotechnology company that spearheaded genetic research on common diseases and offered personalised medical tests has filed for bankruptcy, The Guardian reported. The Icelandic firm, deCODE Genetics, was one of the first in the world to market DNA tests for disease risk directly to the public, and had invested heavily in basic research to uncover the genetic origins of conditions such as breast and prostate cancer, heart disease and diabetes.