Headlines

The European Central Bank will keep raising borrowing costs until it sees core inflation decline sustainably, ECB board member Isabel Schnabel said on Tuesday, adding market expectations for rate cuts were misplaced, Reuters reported. Schnabel backed the ECB's decision last week to slow down the pace of rate hikes but said these will continue until it sees a sustained fall in core prices, which typically exclude food and energy due to their wild swings.

Sweden’s property crisis worsened after one of the country’s biggest commercial landlords took steps to conserve cash and put its focus on selling assets to plug a funding gap, Bloomberg News reported. SBB postponed a dividend and scrapped plans to sell shares in the wake of a credit rating downgrade to junk. Like many other Swedish property companies, the landlord — formally named Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget i Norden AB — is scrambling to refinance debt, but higher interest rates and investor concerns have closed off many options.

The economy of Peru, the world's No.2 copper producer, may have contracted in the first quarter, though the most likely scenario is for no growth at all, the head of the Andean nation's central bank Julio Velarde said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The grim outlook comes after neighboring Chile upwardly revised its forecast for annual economic growth this year to 0.3%, reversing a previous estimate of a 0.7% contraction.

A U.S. accounting watchdog found unacceptable deficiencies in audits of U.S.-listed Chinese companies performed by KPMG in China and PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong, the government agency said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)published the findings of its inspections after gaining access to Chinese company auditors' records for the first time last year following more than a decade of negotiations with Chinese authorities. That access kept roughly 200 China-based public companies from potentially being kicked off U.S.

Hong Kong indicated that crypto companies drawn by the city’s push to create a digital-asset hub should expect an exacting regulatory regime, Bloomberg News reported. “Our regulation will be tight,” Hong Kong Monetary Authority Chief Executive Eddie Yue said in an interview at the Bloomberg Wealth Asia Summit on Tuesday. “We will let them create the ecosystem here and that actually brings a lot of excitement.

Rio de Janeiro’s electric company says so many people are stealing power in the city’s slums that it has been pushed into default, causing a massive selloff and attracting a veteran buyer of distressed Brazilian corporations, Bloomberg News reported. Light SA lost around $200 million last year from the illegal hookups, perched like a tangle of wire birds’ nests atop power poles across Rio’s favelas. That’s even after years of investment to prevent theft. The 120-year-old utility says it can’t keep absorbing the losses, which also include delinquencies and judicial costs.

The economy of Cyprus is expected to grow by 2.6% this year, a full three points lower than the 2022 increase in the island's nation's gross domestic product, the governor of the country's central bank said Tuesday, the Associated Press reported. Governor Constantinos Herodotou said at an economic forum Tuesday that despite the slower growth rate, the forecast compares favorably with the average growth of 1% expected in other countries that use the euro.

A total of 1,644 companies in Romania went insolvent in the first quarter of 2023 (Q1), a number similar to the one in Q1 2022, when 1,610 insolvent companies were registered, Romanian-Insider.com reported. Of the companies that went into insolvency, 23 are impactful companies, totalling over 1,950 employees, fixed assets worth over RON 589 million (EUR 120 mln) and a total turnover of RON 805 million (EUR 163 mln), according to an analysis by CITR, the insolvency and restructuring market leader in Romania.

The Indian government is considering a creditor-led insolvency resolution mechanism under the bankruptcy law to fast-track settlement and ease the burden on the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), people aware of the development said, the Economic Times of India reported. Under this mechanism, creditors and debtors can reach informal agreements on the plans to resolve bankruptcy and then approach the NCLT to quickly admit the cases, one of the persons said. The details will be finalised after broader stakeholder consultations.

An Indian tribunal will decide on Wednesday on Go Airlines (India) Ltd's bankruptcy request, a notice on the tribunal's website showed, as leasing companies step up pressure to repossess planes following missed rental payments, Reuters reported. The low-cost carrier filed for bankruptcy protection last week, blaming "faulty" Pratt & Whitney (P&W) engines for the grounding of about half its 54 Airbus A320neos. P&W, part of Raytheon Technologies, has called the airline's claims "astounding" and without evidence.