Headlines

Bankruptcy Judge Michael Wiles on Friday approved a $700 million financing package for SAS AB from Apollo Global Management, though he said features of the deal concern him, Bloomberg News reported. The financing, divided into two $350 million draws, will allow Apollo to convert the debt into stock in the bankrupt airline or participate in an equity raise tied to SAS’s eventual exit from chapter 11 protection under certain circumstances. Judge Wiles called the financing “unusual” and questioned whether it was legally viable.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to unveil measures to provide inflation relief to low-income families, a government source said, confirming reports in domestic media, Reuters reported. Inflation eased to 7.6% in July from an almost four-decade high of 8.1%. But the Bank of Canada is still concerned about rising prices and is promising further interest rate hikes after increasing them to their highest level in 14 years on Wednesday.

More than a year after the Great Resignation took hold in the United States, Canada is grappling with its own greyer version: The Great Retirement, Reuters reported. Canada's labor force grew in August, but it fell the previous two months and remains smaller than before the summer as tens of thousands of people simply stopped working. Much of this can be chalked up to more Canadians than ever retiring, said Statistics Canada. It is not just the 65-and-over crowd packing up their offices and hanging up their tool belts.

Peru's finance ministry on Thursday unveiled an economic package it says can help lift the economy at times of a global slowdown and falling copper prices, which are key to the country's economy, Reuters reported. Finance Minister Kurt Burneo said the measures could boost gross domestic product growth by 0.6% this year and by 0.8% in 2023. The announcement comes just weeks after Peru's finance ministry announced economic growth projections that exceeded analysts consensus. The ministry expects GDP growth of 3.3% this year, while analysts polled by Refinitiv forecasts 2.6%.

French power distributor Electricite de Strasbourg SA oversold large quantities of electricity due to trading errors earlier this week, a mistake that could cost the company 60 million euros ($60.3 million). The utility’s ES Energies Strasbourg unit made quantity errors on transactions on Tuesday and Wednesday amounting to 2.03 gigawatts and 5.75 gigawatts of electricity, the company said in a statement.

El Al Israel Airlines plans to repay a $45 million loan that it took from the government during the COVID-19 pandemic by the end of the year, under a deal reached between the airline and Finance Ministry, they said on Sunday, Reuters reported. The loan was part of a government package to help the airline weather the crisis, in which Israel's borders were closed to foreign tourists for nearly two years, sending revenue and profit at Israel's flag carrier tumbling.

The European Central Bank said it would raise its key interest rate by 0.75 percentage point, the biggest increase since the early days of Europe’s monetary union, moving aggressively to combat record inflation even as an energy crisis puts Europe on the brink of recession, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bank said in a statement that it would increase its key rate to 0.75% from zero—its second hike this year following a 50-basis-point rise in July—and signaled that further rises were likely this year.

A Swiss court has granted the operating company for the never-opened Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was built to bring Russian gas to Germany but put on ice shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, a four-month extension to its “stay of bankruptcy,” the Associated Press reported. The stay for Nord Stream 2 AG was extended from Sept. 10 through Jan. 10 by a regional court in Zug canton (state), according to a notice published Thursday in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce. The company, a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom, is based in Zug.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the continuing effects of the pandemic have hobbled countries around the globe, but the relentless series of crises has hit Europe the hardest, causing the steepest jump in energy prices, some of the highest inflation rates and the biggest risk of recession, the New York Times reported. The fallout from the war is menacing the continent with what some fear could become its most challenging economic and financial crisis in decades.

Newly installed U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss told Parliament on Wednesday that she would tackle Britain’s “very serious” energy crisis while still slashing taxes, ruling out imposing a windfall levy on oil companies to pay for her plans to offset the soaring cost of heating and electricity, the Associated Press reported. Truss rebuffed opposition calls for a new windfall tax, even as she refrained from explaining how she would fund a plan meant to help the public pay energy bills skyrocketing because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the economic aftershocks of COVID-19 and Brexit.