Headlines

Argentina’s international bonds leaped to their highest in more than a year after the government said it planned to repurchase about $1 billion of the debt, surprising investors in the cash-strapped country, Bloomberg News reported. The South American nation’s $16.1 billion in overseas bonds due 2030 rose as much as 3.2 cents to more than 36 cents on the dollar, the highest since October 2021, before paring gains. It is those bonds, plus ones maturing in 2029, that the government plans to buy back, Economy Minister Sergio Massa said Wednesday, without giving details.

Deutsche Lufthansa AG said it aims to buy a minority stake in ITA Airways, seeking to advance an industry consolidation that would give the German airline a stronger foothold in a major European aviation market, Bloomberg News. reported. The German carrier didn’t disclose financial details, or lay out the size of the stake it wishes to buy in the successor of Alitalia SpA. Lufthansa wants to buy as much as 40% of ITA in an initial step and subject to negotiations.

Germany is set to dodge a widely expected recession this year, a source told Reuters on Wednesday, adding to a chorus of voices predicting a brighter outlook for Europe's biggest economy as energy prices fall. Facing soaring gas prices due to the war in Ukraine and supply bottlenecks, consumer prices exploded last year, and the government and economists saw no way around recession. However, a 200-billion-euro relief package to shield consumers from surging energy prices, a mild winter and a readiness to save energy have changed the picture.

Lebanon’s caretaker government Wednesday approved opening credit lines totaling $116 million to help fix its crippled state electricity grid, the Associated Press reported. The cash-strapped country for over two years has struggled with rampant power cuts that have crippled much of public life, worsening a broader economic crisis that has pulled over three-quarters of the country’s population into poverty. Today, households only receive about an hour of state electricity per day, with millions now relying on expensive private generator suppliers to power their homes.

Governments could get a bigger windfall than previously estimated if they implement a planned overhaul of international tax rules, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Paris-based body guided lengthy talks that eventually led to the October 2021 international tax agreement. The plan set a minimum tax rate of 15% on the profits of large businesses and shifted some tax revenues to where companies sell to consumers, rather than where they are based.

Romanian aluminium car parts manufacturer Altur Slatina said that its board decided to waive insolvency proceedings initiated earlier this month, SeeNews.com reported. The company submitted the waiver to an Olt County court, which acknowledged the filing on Thursday, Altur said in a statement filed with the Bucharest Stock Exchange on Friday. On January 4, Altur announced its submission of the application for the launch of insolvency proceedings with the same court.

Japan is urging the world’s regulators to treat crypto as strictly as they do banks, adding to the calls for tougher rules following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX digital-asset exchange, Bloomberg News reported. “Crypto has become this big,” Mamoru Yanase, deputy director-general of the Financial Services Agency’s Strategy Development and Management Bureau, said in an interview.

The Bank of Japan is under pressure to revise policy again at its meeting ending Wednesday after investors repeatedly attacked the central bank’s new 0.5% cap for the 10-year government bond yield, the Wall Street Journal reported. The battle between the BOJ and the markets has upended what are expected to be the final months of Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda‘s decade in the job. He has devoted his term to keeping interest rates ultralow, a policy that many market players believe is likely to end this year with inflation in Japan nearing 4%.

China's Country Garden had some rare good news for the cash-squeezed property sector with an offshore debt repayment on Tuesday, but a closer look reveals just how much developers may still struggle to access capital, developers and analysts said, Reuters reported. China's largest developer by sales said it repaid its 4.75% dollar bonds with outstanding principal totalling $625 million. The payment was due on Tuesday.

The co-founders of failed cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital are now courting investors for a new venture that looks to capitalize on a growing list of bankruptcies in the space, CNBC.com reported. Kyle Davies and Su Zhu are listed as founding members in a pitch deck obtained by CNBC for a distressed debt marketplace called GTX. Davies and Zhu founded Three Arrows Capital, a once $10 billion Singapore-based hedge fund that filed for bankruptcy in July.