Headlines

China Evergrande Group shares slumped on Thursday after the developer's thinly detailed roadmap for restructuring left investors dissatisfied and its indebted peers also fell on concerns higher interest rates would raise financing costs, Reuters reported. Regulatory curbs on borrowing have driven China's property sector into crisis, highlighted by Evergrande, the world's most indebted property firm.

The Bank of Canada's decision to delay a rate hike for five more weeks will add fuel to Canada's scorching housing market as buyers scramble to clinch deals before borrowing costs rise, realtors said, Reuters reported. The Bank of Canada held its overnight rate at a record low 0.25% on Wednesday, but warned multiple increases would be coming soon. The U.S. Federal Reserve separately also said it would start hiking soon. Canada's housing market has been on tear throughout much of the pandemic, with prices up 39% nationwide from February 2020 to December 2021.

Swiss banks have criticised planned new measures designed to cool the country's red hot property market, saying the steps were unnecessary and would do nothing to slow rising house prices, Bloomberg News reported. The government said on Wednesday that from October, lenders must increase their cushion against home lending risks, sounding the alarm over one of Europe's most expensive housing markets, where total mortgage lending has swollen to more than $1 trillion.

Argentina’s looming deadline to make a payment of over $700 million to the International Monetary Fund on Friday is exposing a growing divide within the ruling coalition, Bloomberg News reported. The public disagreements in the government of President Alberto Fernandez, with its more radical wing suggesting the country could default on the Washington-based organization, come as Economy Minister Martin Guzman leads negotiations with IMF staff for a new program to reschedule payments on over $40 billion in outstanding debt.

Britain hopes to secure significant progress in post-Brexit trade talks with the European Union by February and win the support of pro-British unionists in Northern Ireland opposed to the current arrangements, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said, Reuters reported. Truss was speaking on Thursday during a visit to Belfast, where she spoke to politicians and business people about their concerns about post-Brexit restrictions on trade between the British region and the rest of the United Kingdom. "I want to make significant progress by February. That's important.

Two former Deutsche Bank AG traders were cleared by an appeals court in the latest blow to the troubled transatlantic crackdown on manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, Bloomberg News reported. Matthew Connolly and Gavin Black were found guilty of wire fraud in 2018 for rigging Deutsche Bank’s Libor submission. But the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Thursday threw out their convictions, saying prosecutors failed to prove the two men influenced the bank into making false or misleading submissions. Prosecutors in the U.S. and the U.K.

Stellantis is preparing to early repay a 6.3 billion euros ($7 billion) loan backed by Italian government its predecessor Fiat Chrysler obtained at the peak of a COVID-19 outbreak, two sources close to the matter said on Thursday, Reuters reported. Repaying the loan potentially frees Stellantis from a set of conditions that Rome attached to it, including preserving jobs at its Italian operations, timely paying suppliers that are crucial for local plants or financing domestic investments, in particular for electric vehicles. The repayment is imminent, one of the sources said.

Facing heat from banks for recovery of outstanding dues, Future Retail on Tuesday moved the Supreme Court seeking quashing of lenders' letters threatening initiation of insolvency proceedings by citing its still alive, but mired in cross-country litigations initiated by multinational Amazon, deal with Reliance Retail for sale of assets for nearly Rs 25,000 crore, the Times of India reported.

China Evergrande Group asked international creditors to give the giant property developer more time to get a grip on its complicated financial situation, and warned that drastic legal action could be destabilizing, the Wall Street Journal reported. The plea came days after a group of international bondholders threatened to enforce their legal rights against Evergrande, saying that they had been unable to engage substantively with the troubled Chinese real-estate company for months.

The Bank of Canada held interest rates unchanged but signaled it could tighten monetary policy in coming weeks to contain the highest inflation in three decades, Bloomberg News reported. Policy makers led by Governor Tiff Macklem left the central bank’s main policy rate at 0.25%, where it’s been since March 2020, amid uncertainty stemming from the resurgent coronavirus.