Headlines

Over the last two years, Masataka Yoshimura has poured money into the custom-suit business his family founded more than a century ago. He has upgraded his factory, installed automated inventory management systems and retrained workers who have been replaced by software and robots. Japan’s prime minister, however, wants him to do one more thing: Give his employees a substantial raise, the New York Times reported. The reasoning is simple. Wage growth has been stagnant for decades in Japan, the wealth gap is widening and the quickest fix is nudging people like Mr.

Germany has long been ahead of the curve as a source of technical innovation and manufacturing. Now it is leading much of the developed world toward a demographic cliff edge that could put a damper on Europe’s largest economy, raising pressure on its pension system and pushing inflation higher for years to come, the Wall Street Journal reported. Economists forecast that Germany’s workforce could peak as soon as 2023 and then shrink by up to five million people by the end of the decade.

China Evergrande Group said on Sunday it had made initial progress in resuming construction work with its chairman vowing to deliver 39,000 units of properties in December, compared with fewer than 10,000 in each of the previous three months, Reuters reported. Evergrande is the world's most indebted property developer, with over $300 billion in liabilities. It is struggling to repay bondholders, banks, suppliers, and deliver homes to buyers, epitomising a bloated industry suffering from the Chinese government's deleveraging campaign.

Profits at China's industrial firms grew at a slower pace in November, the statistics bureau said on Monday, Reuters reported. Profits rose 9.0% on-year in November to 805.96 billion yuan ($126.54 billion), official data showed, compared with a 24.6% gain reported in October. For the January-November period, industrial firms' profits rose 38.0% year-on-year to 7.98 trillion yuan, slower than a 42.2% rise in the first 10 months of 2021. The industrial profit data covers large firms with annual revenues of over 20 million yuan from their main operations.

Flight cancellations marred Christmas weekend for many travelers, as Covid-19 left carriers short-staffed to operate busy schedules over the holiday, the Wall Street Journal reported. In the U.S., canceled flights mounted through the weekend and involved many airlines. The disruptions came suddenly as a ramp-up in employee absences caught carriers off guard. The industry for months had been adjusting to labor shortages amid high customer demand, and because of measures such as incentive pay and scaled-back schedules had gotten through Thanksgiving largely without problems.

The board of Jordan's Capital Bank approved a mandatory offer to acquire Societe Generale Bank Jordan (SGBJ), part of a drive to expand the bank's foothold regionally and domestically, its chairman said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Bassem Al Salem told Reuters an extraordinary general meeting had on Thursday also agreed to issue $100 million in perpetual bonds - meaning they have no maturity - to help drive growth.

The world's economic output will exceed $100 trillion for the first time next year and it will take China a little longer than previously thought to overtake the United States as the No.1 economy, a report showed on Sunday, Reuters reported. British consultancy Cebr predicted China will become the world's top economy in dollar terms in 2030, two years later than forecast in last year's World Economic League Table report. India looks set to overtake France next year and then Britain in 2023 to regain its place as the world's sixth biggest economy, Cebr said.

The European Commission proposed on Wednesday three new EU-wide taxes to help to repay the joint government borrowing in the 27-nation bloc for their 800 billion euro ($904 billion) COVID-19 recovery fund, Reuters reported. The first measure will introduce a levy on CO2 emitted by fuels for buildings and cars under a new carbon market, while using the EU's existing carbon trading system to impose CO2 costs on ships and increase existing payments from airlines.

Debt-laden China Evergrande Group said that the committee helping steer its massive restructuring is deploying extensive resources to help contain risks and will engage with creditors, the Wall Street Journal reported. The reassurance echoes a pledge earlier this month to work with holders of offshore debt and follows a sustained selloff in the company’s stock and bonds, with Evergrande shares recently hitting a series of record lows.

The power to attach assets under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act will come to a halt once the liquidation process under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code begins, the Delhi High Court said in an order last week, Bloomberg reported. In PSL Ltd.'s case, Nitin Jain was appointed as the liquidator by the National Company Law Tribunal under IBC to administer the affairs and estate of the company. Subsequently, Jain got a summons by the Enforcement Directorate, which was investigating the affairs of the company under the PMLA. Jain challenged the ED's move before the high court.