Headlines

China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group said on Thursday that it had applied to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to resume trading in the company's shares on Friday, Reuters reported. Trading in the shares of the company, the electric vehicle unit of China Evergrande Group, has been suspended since April 1, 2022, after it got sucked into a debt crisis in mid-2021. Read more.

China’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to a record in the second quarter, although consumers and businesses are borrowing at a slow pace, reflecting low confidence that’s hitting economic growth, Bloomberg News reported. Total debt — combining the household, corporate and government sectors — climbed to 281.5% of gross domestic product in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg’s calculations based on data from China’s central bank and the National Bureau of Statistics. That was up from 279.7% in the first quarter.

China’s central bank called on the financial sector to help fund technology research and M&A deals, the latest in a string of promises to revive a private sector devastated by a two-year regulatory crackdown. A plethora of Beijing officials have in recent weeks talked about measures to prop up private firms, regarded as key to resuscitating a sputtering economy. On Thursday, the central bank asked lenders and financial markets to provide more support for innovation and tech-related acquisitions, and to boost investment in startups.

Turkey’s new central bank governor delivered a sobering assessment on inflation but pledged to stick with a “gradual” cycle of monetary tightening despite more than doubling the forecast for price gains, Bloomberg News reported. At an event on Thursday that marked her public debut, Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan had the task of restoring the credibility of an institution in need of rehabilitation in the eyes of the markets after years of unconventional measures championed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erkan, appointed last month after long stints in the US at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Major central banks are nervously eyeing the end of aggressive interest rate hikes as price pressures finally show signs of easing, Reuters reported. Inflation remains high across the globe, but in some big economies has cooled faster than expected. Upcoming decisions are on a knife-edge. Pausing too early could cause financial conditions to loosen too fast, re-igniting inflationary pressures. Stopping too late could put a credit crunch and a deep recession on the cards. To date, nine developed economies have raised rates by a combined 3,840 basis points (bps) in this cycle.

The European Central Bank raised interest rates for the ninth consecutive time on Thursday but dialled up the possibility of a pause next month as stubbornly high inflation and recession worries pull policymakers in opposing directions, Reuters reported. Fighting off a historic surge in prices, the ECB has now lifted borrowing costs by a combined 425 basis points since last July, worried that price growth could be perpetuated by both rising costs and wages in an exceptionally tight jobs market.

The dovish Bank of Japan faced a tough two-day policy-setting meeting that started Thursday due to potentially changing inflation dynamics, with edgy financial markets seesawing over whether its controversial yield cap program will be modified. The BOJ is widely expected to revise upward its earlier inflation forecast for the current fiscal year to next March, given more evidence that price hikes, initially prompted by surging fuel and raw material costs, have been broadening in a notable change for the once deflation-mired nation, the Japan Times reported.

Australia’s two biggest states will struggle to return their budgets to surplus as the economy sags under central bank rate hikes that also sent government borrowing costs soaring, according to ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service, Bloomberg News reported.

Nigel Farage, who helped mobilize the pro-Brexit vote in 2016, was marginalized in Britain, then consumed by the pandemic. No longer: For three weeks, Mr. Farage, has been back on the front pages of British papers, with an attention-grabbing claim that his exclusive private bank, Coutts, dropped him as a customer because of his polarizing politics. Early on Wednesday, after Farage’s allegations were largely vindicated, the chief executive of his bank’s parent, NatWest Group, resigned after she admitted improperly discussing his bank account with a BBC journalist.

The Bank of England forecast on Tuesday that it would make a net loss of just over 150 billion pounds ($193 billion) over the next 10 years as it unwinds its quantitative easing (QE) gilt purchases, up from 100 billion pounds projected in April, Reuters reported. That loss will need to be funded by the government, at a time when public finances are already under pressure from rising interest rates and inflation, and members of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party want tax cuts before a likely 2024 election.