Headlines

Cracks are showing in a pillar of China’s debt market: local-government financing vehicles (LGFVs), the Washington Post reported. Created to fund such things as roads, airports and power infrastructure, they rarely generate enough returns to cover their obligations. That means most rely on injections of municipal funds to stay solvent. With many local authorities facing cash-flow problems due to a real estate crisis, there are growing concerns about this $9 trillion debt market — prompting the country’s biggest state banks to take steps to avert a credit crunch.

Former star UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes, the first person jailed over the Libor rate scandal, can return to the Court of Appeal in a fresh attempt to overturn his conviction after an eight-year battle to clear his name, Reuters reported. In a landmark decision, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), an independent body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice, said on Thursday there was a "real possibility" that Hayes's conviction could be overturned. "We have concluded ...

A pair of central bank decisions next week will shape the outlook for a wobbly global economy that the World Bank warns in a downbeat new assessment is battling stubbornly high inflation amid the pandemic’s aftermath and the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported. The gloomy forecast arrives days after one threat to global growth was eliminated when President Biden signed legislation Saturday to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and avert a potentially catastrophic government default.

Not long ago, Huobi was one of the top crypto exchanges in the world, Bitcoinist reported. At its peak, it was processing over $2 billion in trades per day and ranked third in total volume. These days, Huobi seems to be losing steam. Recent reports and data shared by Willy Woo, a crypto expert on Twitter, indicate that the exchange’s transaction volume and web traffic appear to have suffered a plunge in recent months. Crypto balances held on the Huobi exchange have decreased by over 90% since late 2020.

Norwegian Air has agreed to buy domestic peer Wideroe for 1.13 billion crowns ($106 million) as the reborn airline looks to strengthen its position in its home region, Reuters reported. The deal is the latest reshuffling in the Norwegian airline sector that saw newcomer Flyr file for bankruptcy in January having failed to raise enough cash to survive the winter season. The two companies, which have been collaborating on routes since last year, will continue to operate independently, but the networks will be more closely integrated in the future, Norwegian Air CEO Geir Karlsen said.

“Robust demand” for space pushed the take-up rate in Dublin’s industrial and logistics property market to their second highest level for the first half of the year between January and June with construction activity reaching a record high, the Irish Times reported. In its latest report on the market, Savills Ireland said that 1.6 million sq ft of space was taken up in the first six months of the year, 620,000 sq ft in the second quarter of the year. The latter figure was in line with the five-year average, the property adviser said.

The Canadian dollar weakened to a three-week low against its U.S. counterpart on Thursday as Wall Street stocks fell and data showed Canada's trade balance swinging to a surprise deficit, Reuters reported. The loonie was trading 0.6% lower at 1.3358 to the greenback, or 74.86 U.S. cents, after touching its weakest intraday level since June 13 at 1.3369. "We had a dreadful trade number," said Marc Chandler, chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex LLC.

Amid the ruins of a city ravaged by World War II, Karl Haeusgen’s grandfather invented a hydraulic pump he was so proud of that he founded a company to sell it, the New York Times reported. Back then, there were no revenue projections or five-year growth strategies. The plan was survival: “It was just about grabbing chances,” Mr. Haeusgen said. Seven decades and three generations later the family business, Hawe Hydraulics, ships some 2,500 parts around the globe. Instead of scrambling for sales, though, Mr. Haeusgen must parse the geopolitics of an ever more polarized world.

Cineworld Group is looking at Eduardo Acuna, who runs the Americas operations of Mexico's Cinepolis, as a potential candidate to take the helm at the embattled British cinema chain operator when it emerges from bankruptcy proceedings, Sky News reported. It is not clear whether Acuna was formally in the frame to take the job or how quickly Cineworld's new owners were seeking to make an appointment, the report said.

Liu Zhongtian, who founded Zhongwang Group and built it into Asia's biggest maker of aluminum extrusion products while launching himself onto the Forbes list of China's richest billionaires, now finds himself under legal restraint with his company in bankruptcy and much of his wealth evaporated, Nikkei Asia reported. What went wrong? Zhongwang was set to file a reorganization plan on June 20, nine months after creditors applied for a bankruptcy restructuring of the manufacturer's hundreds of subsidiaries and affiliates.