Headlines

The Hyderabad bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has initiated corporate insolvency proceedings against GVK Power & Infrastructure (GPIL) in response to a petition by ICICI Bank and joined by five other banks seeking recovery of about Rs 18,000 crore of dues from the company, the Economic Times of India reported. ICICI Bank had petitioned the court in November 2020 to pursue the recovery of its $1.35 billion lent through its Dubai, Bahrain and Singapore branches along with 3 other lenders.

Indian education technology company Byju's will challenge insolvency proceedings initiated against it in an attempt to block the process this week, as the startup once valued at $22 billion tries to tide over the crisis, two sources said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The National Company Law Tribunal in the southern state of Karnataka on Tuesday ordered insolvency proceedings against the company after a complaint by the cricket board for not paying $19 million in dues. A court-appointed professional is currently running the company.

British inflation defied forecasts for a slight fall and held at 2% in June while strong underlying price pressures prompted investors to reduce bets that the Bank of England will cut interest rates in two weeks' time for the first time since 2020, Reuters reported. Increases in hotel prices - in a month when U.S. pop star Taylor Swift and other performers toured the UK - were partly to blame for the higher-than-expected inflation number, underscoring the BoE's concern about services prices.

The last time a freshly minted Labour government unabashedly campaigned on an ambitious national industrial policy to revive the British economy was 50 years ago, and the results were generally viewed as disastrous, the New York Times reported. The 1974 program of subsidies, state ownership and power sharing among business, unions and government resulted in strikes that paralyzed the nation. And the government’s goal of picking industrial winners turned into a policy of backing losers like the automaker British Leyland and British Steel Corporation.

Inflation in New Zealand softened by more than expected in the three months through June, raising the prospect that the official cash rate could be cut as soon as next month, the Wall Street Journal reported. Consumer prices rose by 0.4% in the second quarter of this year, and by 3.3% from the same period a year earlier, Stats NZ said Wednesday. The annual rise was lower than the 3.6% increase expected by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, which has turned more dovish recently as the South Pacific economy struggles to emerge from a postpandemic slump.

Chinese developer Hopson Development Holdings Ltd. has received a maturity extension of a loan from 2023 that backed the purchase of some commercial real estate space in a Hong Kong office building, Bloomberg News reported. Seatown Holdings Pte Ltd., a subsidiary of Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd., has extended around $100 million to $115 million of a $165 million loan for Hopson. The developer had paid down a portion of the facility, originally due in May, to obtain a lower interest rate.

The World Trade Organization said on Wednesday that it was unable to get a clear picture of China's financial support for key industrial sectors, such as electric vehicles or aluminium and steel production due to an "overall lack of transparency," Reuters reported. The WTO noted that the world's second-largest economy gave financial support and other incentives to industries over the 2021-2024 review period but said that Beijing did not provide enough information for the WTO to have a clear picture of the programmes.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva cast doubt on the need to meet Brazil’s fiscal targets, saying in an interview with a local TV station that he is “not obligated to set a goal and stick to it” if he decides he “has more important things to do,” Bloomberg News reported. “It’s just a matter of vision,” Lula said in the Tuesday interview with Record TV. “This country has no problem if it is a zero deficit, if it is a 0.1% deficit, if it is a 0.2% deficit. There is no problem for the country.

A fresh wave of tariffs could revive inflation and pressure central banks to keep their key interest rates high, the International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. In its latest report on the outlook for the global economy, the Fund said borrowing costs could also be pushed higher by a series of elections that may lead to a surge in already high levels of government borrowing. The Fund left its forecast for world economic growth this year unchanged at 3.2%, and raised its forecast for next year to 3.3% from 3.2%.

With many Canadian homeowners facing a sharp rise in mortgage payments, many of them have decided to bail, resulting in the highest number of Toronto housing units for sale in more than a decade and signaling a big drop in prices in the coming months, Reuters reported. In Toronto, a city where two-thirds of the country's condominiums are sold, considered a bellwether for other big metropolitan areas, inventories have pushed past highs reached 10 years ago, data showed. At the same time, sales have lagged.