Headlines

The value of loans made by pawnbrokers in the UK topped £250 million last year after a 13% rise, new data shows, the Evening Standard reported. Data from audit and tax firm Mazars shows that the value of pawnbroker loans increased from £224 million in 2022 to £252 million in 2023, as the cost of living crisis put stress on household finances. Amid interest rate uncertainty, many traditional lenders also tightened borrowing criteria, which helped to fuel the rise as well.

The Bank of England will be able to cut interest rates “some time over the summer” if second round inflation pressures drop away as expected, Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent said, Bloomberg News reported. In his last speech after 13 years at the UK central bank, Broadbent signaled that the decision to cut rates from the current 16-year high of 5.25% would hinge on the stickiness of wage growth and whether businesses pass higher payroll costs through to prices.

An Australian computer scientist who claimed he invented bitcoin lied "extensively and repeatedly" and forged documents "on a grand scale" to support his false claim, a judge at London's High Court ruled on Monday, Reuters reported. Craig Wright had long claimed to have been the author of a 2008 white paper, the foundational text of bitcoin, published under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto".

A leveraged trade that’s worrying regulators worldwide has caught the attention of the European Central Bank, which pointed to signs the strategy is gaining traction in the region, Bloomberg News reported. The ECB noted a group of offshore hedge funds has become increasingly present in Europe’s government bond repo market, suggesting growing use of the so-called basis trade. The strategy, which looks to exploit price differences between futures and bonds, has come under scrutiny in the US after it contributed to market turmoil at the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Brazil's central bank announced on Monday that it has decided to divide the process of regulating crypto-assets and virtual asset service providers into phases, with regulatory proposals expected by the end of this year, Reuters reported. The decision effectively delays the completion of the process following a 2022 law on the subject, which paved the way for subsequent regulation by the central bank. In a congressional hearing last year, the bank's director of regulation, Otavio Damaso, had projected regulation to be wrapped up by June 2024.

Chile’s economy recorded the fastest quarterly growth since 2021, when government stimulus fueled domestic demand during the pandemic, as both mining output and consumption increased while slowing inflation and falling interest rates provided much-needed relief, Bloomberg News reported. Gross domestic product rose 1.9% in the first quarter compared with the prior three months, a tad less than the 2% median forecast from analysts in a Bloomberg survey. From a year ago, the economy expanded 2.3%, the central bank reported on Monday.

Thailand’s economy grew in the first quarter as private consumption and tourism helped counter weakness in goods exports, but the outlook for the year remains cloudy, the Wall Street Journal reported. Gross domestic product rose 1.5% from a year earlier, compared with the 1.7% expansion seen in the final quarter of 2023, the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Council said on Monday.

The UK government is continuing to resist stepping in to help Thames Water, despite its rapidly deteriorating financial situation, Bloomberg News reported. The utility needs to find new equity to stabilize its finances. Shareholders say they won’t put in more money and it’s difficult to see why a new investor would want to take on the burden of Thames’s £18 billion ($22.9 billion) debt pile. On Friday, Thames’s biggest shareholder wrote off the entire value of its stake in the latest sign of trouble for the utility.

The haircuts taken by creditors in Indian bankruptcy resolutions have increased to 73 percent in FY24 from the 64 percent in FY23, a report said on Friday, the Economic Times of India reported. A total of 269 resolution plans were approved by the National Company Law Tribunals (NCLTs) in FY24, up from 189 in the year-ago period, the report by domestic rating agency Icra said. The new admissions declined to 987 in FY24 from the 1,263 in FY23, the agency said, attributing the same to a higher base in the previous fiscal because of the Covid-19 pandemic-related stress.

Consolidation would lower the cost of capital for Latin American airlines, resulting in better services for customers, according to Azul SA Chief Executive Officer John Peter Rodgerson, Bloomberg News reported. “We’ve always been big believers in consolidation,” Rodgerson said in an interview in New York Wednesday. “The product improves for customers, and it could really strengthen a great market in Brazil that we’re seeing today.” Rodgerson declined to comment on “active” M&A processes.