Headlines

Europe’s weaker airlines face a heightened risk of collapse this winter as nations that rescued carriers during the Covid crisis focus support elsewhere amid rising inflation, according to analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein, Bloomberg News reported. While the pandemic brought few airline failures in the region amid a deluge of aid payments, carriers now face a squeeze from higher fuel and labor costs combined with a seasonal decline in travel, Bernstein said in an investor note Monday. That’s just as governments struggle to respond to soaring household bills.

Crisis-hit Scandinavian airline SAS sees savings of $200 million through 2026 from a new collective bargaining deal reached with most of its pilots following a crippling two-week strike in July, Reuters reported. The flag carrier, pressured for years by low-cost rivals and ravaged by the pandemic, in February announced a big restructuring plan, and on the second day of the strike sought U.S. bankruptcy protection.

A union representing pilots at Lufthansa on Tuesday called off a planned two-day strike after a last-minute agreement with Germany’s biggest airline in a pay dispute, the Associated Press reported. The Vereinigung Cockpit union had announced plans for a walkout on Wednesday and Thursday, calling on the company to make a “serious” offer in talks over pay increases. It would have been the second strike in a week after pilots staged a walkout Friday that led to hundreds of flights being canceled.

Former Trinity Biotech chief executive Brendan Farrell, co-founder of insolvent medical diagnostics company HiberGene Diagnostics, is looking for potential buyers for the business in a last-ditch effort to save it, the Irish Times reported. Mr. Farrell, who also served as chief executive of HiberGene until he resigned from the board of the company in 2018, told the Irish Times on Friday that he had spoken to one Irish investor and two from outside the country with a view to securing funding to keep the business afloat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is telling American audit firms to be cautious about taking on as new clients Chinese firms that trade in New York, Bloomberg News reported. The warning on Tuesday follows several businesses switching to U.S. auditors amid an ongoing dispute between regulators in Washington and Beijing over access to audit work papers that could lead to about 200 companies being kicked off American stock exchanges.

Brazil's central bank chief Roberto Campos Neto said that policymakers aren't focusing on monetary easing at the moment as the priority remains on bringing back inflation to the official target, Reuters reported. "We've been communicating that we don't look, don't think about falling interest rates at this moment," Campos Neto said late on Monday in a speech at an event hosted by the Valor Econômico newspaper. "We think about finishing the work. Finishing the work means converging inflation," he said.

Pilots at Lufthansa went on strike on Friday, forcing the German airline to cancel hundreds of flights, stranding holidaymakers, Reuters reported. The airline said that it had cancelled about 800 flights at its main bases in Frankfurt and Munich on Friday, affecting 130,000 passengers, and said it was working flat out to minimise the impact of the strike. Labour union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) had called on more than 5,000 Lufthansa pilots to stage a 24-hour walkout, saying the latest round of wage talks had failed.

The British government is set to release data showing around 1.1 billion pounds of small business loans ($1.27 billion) made under a COVID-19 emergency lending scheme has already been classified as suspected fraud, a source told Reuters. The previously unpublished data from Britain's Department for Business, Energy and Industry (BEIS) gives the first firm indication of likely fraud levels in the scheme, which has faced scrutiny over the quality of checks on borrowers.

Japan's household spending grew for a second straight month in July despite a resurgence in COVID-19 cases, but inflationary pressures from the yen's slump to a 24-year-low have cast doubt over a revival in consumption, Reuters reported. From falling real wages to shrinking service sector activity, data this week has shown private consumption stalling, undermining some of the gains made in April-June.