Headlines

A Surrey company director who fraudulently moved £100,000 in Covid-19 loans through his family's bank accounts has avoided jail, BBC.com reported. Muhammadh Chaudhry secured a £50,000 Bounce Back Loan for a media business in July 2020 and then fraudulently obtained another £50,000 loan for UK Media Kit Hire Ltd in September 2020, which he claimed was a film and TV production company. The 41-year-old then transferred the funds through savings accounts held by close relatives, the Insolvency Service said.

Britain's economy shrank for a second month in a row in October in the run-up to the government's first budget, the first back-to-back falls in output since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a setback for new finance minister Rachel Reeves, Reuters reported. Gross domestic product contracted by 0.1% month-on-month in October, as it did in September, the Office for National Statistics said. It was the first consecutive drop in monthly GDP - which is volatile and prone to revision - since March and April 2020, when Britain enforced its first coronavirus lockdown.

Sri Lanka gained extensive support from private creditors to restructure its international bonds, a key step for the country to exit an extended default, Bloomberg News reported. Investors representing close to 98% of the country’s $12.6 billion in dollar bonds are expected to agree to swap their securities for new notes, the government said, citing preliminary results of its consent solicitation for the exchange. Once confirmed with official results on Dec. 16, the widespread support would mean that the debt restructuring should be completed before year-end.

Chinese leaders met this week to plot economic policy for the coming year, sketching out plans to raise government spending and relax Beijing’s monetary policy to encourage more investment and consumer spending, the Associated Press reported. Leaders of the ruling Communist Party wrapped up their two-day Central Economic Work Conference on Thursday with praise for President Xi Jinping's guidance and a pledge to “enrich and refine the policy toolbox” and defuse risks facing the world's second-largest economy.

The Canadian government is weighing an export tax on certain commodities to the U.S. if President-elect Donald Trump fulfills his pledge of slapping a 25% tariff on all Canadian imports, the Wall Street Journal reported. Among the commodities that could be affected are energy products, most notably crude oil, potash and uranium, but no final decision has been made, the person said. Nearly all crude oil exported from Canada is bound for the U.S. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week that Canada would retaliate against the U.S.

Germany’s economy will hardly grow in 2025 after shrinking again this year, according to fresh forecasts from Bundesbank, Bloomberg News reported. Gross domestic product will fall by 0.2% in 2024, it said Friday — slashing a June prediction for 0.3% growth. Output will expand by just 0.2% in 2025, rather than the 1.1% seen earlier, and could even fall if US trade tariffs materialize. “The German economy is not only struggling with persistent economic headwinds, but also with structural problems,” Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel said, highlighting the industrial sector in particular.

Argentina's economy is expected to have contracted 2.6% in the third quarter of 2024 versus a year earlier, the sixth straight such decline, but expanded against the quarter before, breaking a technical recession going back to the end of last year, Reuters reported. A Reuters poll on Thursday, involving 13 local and foreign analysts, gave the year-on-year contraction of gross domestic product (GDP), which follows a 1.7% contraction in the second quarter and a steep 5.1% drop in the first quarter.

Indonesia said it intervened aggressively in the market to curb the rupiah’s decline as the currency weakened past the key psychological level of 16,000 against the dollar, Bloomberg News reported. “We entered the market with a quite bold triple intervention,” Edi Susianto, executive director for monetary and asset securities management at Bank Indonesia said in text message Friday. Authorities entered the spot, domestic non-deliverable forward and government bond markets to maintain market confidence, he said. The rupiah dropped 0.5% to 16,002 per dollar on Friday.

European Union bonds could pose a threat to Dutch bonds if they are reclassified as sovereign securities by index providers, said the head of the nation’s treasury agency, Bloomberg News reported. The government would prefer it if EU bonds continue to be treated as supranational debt, Saskia van Dun, head of the Dutch State Treasury Agency, said in an interview with Bloomberg, thereby avoiding any competition with bonds sold by member states. The EU has been advocating for its bonds to be treated as government debt so that it can access a wider pool of investors.

Altice France and a group of secured creditors remain at odds over the terms of a deal to cut the company’s €23.7 billion ($24.9 billion) debt pile, including how much equity billionaire owner Patrick Drahi should give up, Bloomberg News reported. The embattled French telecommunications company sent its latest proposal to lenders last week. The size of the equity stake was among points taken issue with by creditors, who had previously also disagreed over the cost of the reinstated debt and the haircut they would have to take, according to company disclosures last month.