Headlines

The World Bank is reducing its global growth forecast for 2022 by nearly a full percentage point, to 3.2% from 4.1%, due to the impacts from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, World Bank President David Malpass said on Monday, Reuters reported. Malpass told reporters on a conference call that the World Bank was responding to the added economic stresses from the war by proposing a new, 15-month crisis financing target of $170 billion, with a goal to commit about $50 billion of this financing over the next three months.

Germany’s employers and unions have joined together in opposing an immediate European Union ban on natural gas imports from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, saying such a move would lead to factory shutdowns and the loss of jobs in the bloc’s largest economy, the Associated Press reported.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange commission (SEC) says it has charged 16 defendants with participating in multiyear penny stock schemes that generated more than $194 million in illicit proceeds, Reuters reported. The defendants, which include 15 individuals and one company, are located in the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, Bulgaria, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Monaco, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom, the SEC said in a statement.

As President Emmanuel Macron far-right candidate Marine Le Pen cross France in a whirlwind of last-minute campaigning, their runoff will hinge to a large extent on perceptions of the economy, the New York Times reported. Worries about widening economic insecurity, and the surging cost of living amid the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine, have become top issues in the race, ahead of security and immigration. Ms.

Sri Lanka is barreling toward a “series of defaults” as it stops paying its foreign debts, Moody’s Investors Service warned in a downgrade of the country’s credit rating, Bloomberg News reported. The first default could come quite soon. The island nation was meant to pay about $78 million in interest to its bondholders on Monday -- until, of course, the government said last week it would halt foreign debt service to preserve cash for food and fuel imports. That has led rating companies to slash Sri Lanka further into junk, with Moody’s on Monday lowering its score to Ca from Caa2.

When Sri Lankan officials arrive in Washington this week to meet with the International Monetary Fund amid an economic and political crisis, the main question they’ll need to answer is how the country plans to manage its billions in debt, Bloomberg News reported. Sri Lanka is seeking up to $4 billion this year to help it import essentials and pay creditors. To get any of that through the IMF’s various programs, the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa must present a sustainable debt program.

Nearly half of the 3,247 insolvency cases have been resolved through liquidation, and only a paltry 457 or 14 per cent of them through asset sale as per their lenders-approved resolution plans, a report said on Friday, the Economic Times of India/em> reported. Even the various resolution processes have witnessed the recovery of debt of just 31 per cent on an average, said the data from the Insolvency & Bankruptcy Board of India.

A Seoul court on Thursday approved a new auction to sell debt-ridden SsangYong Motor Co. following its preferred bidder's payment failure for the carmaker last month, Yonhap News Agency reported. In January, Edison Motors Co. signed a deal to acquire SsangYong for 304.8 billion won (US$249 million). But the deal collapsed as the electric bus maker failed to make the full payment by the March 25 deadline. The Seoul Bankruptcy Court extended the deadline for SsangYong to find a new owner and submit a new restructuring plan by six months until Oct. 15.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has lifted its objection to Limerick-based aircraft lessor Nordic Aviation Capital’s bankruptcy plan, the Independent reported. Nordic Aviation Capital (NAC) has been seeking to get out from under $6.3bn (€5.8bn) of debt by handing it to lenders. The IRS said in a filing on April 15 that it was withdrawing its objection to the bankruptcy plan on the condition that the lenders pay any administrative claims without the IRS having to file a request for them. The IRS had raised a last-minute objection to the plan last week on technical grounds.

British lenders expect loan defaults to rise over the coming months and also plan to rein in mortgage lending by the greatest amount since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Bank of England survey showed on Thursday, Reuters reported. The BoE's quarterly credit conditions survey showed lenders expect more defaults on mortgages, unsecured consumer lending and business loans in the three months to the end of May, although outright losses on mortgage lending were expected to remain stable.