Headlines

Turkish policy makers failed to arrest the lira’s free fall with their third intervention this month as the currency quickly resumed losses amid an interest-rate policy seen as too loose by markets, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary authority said Friday it sold foreign exchange because of “unhealthy” price formations, echoing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s words to describe the recent turbulence. While the lira rebounded briefly, it slid back closer to 14 per dollar, near levels that sparked all the three interventions.

The defaults and slow-moving crises of companies in China’s property sector isn’t just hurting bond-holders and people waiting for their apartments - thousands of small suppliers of everything from tiles to cleaning services are waiting to get paid by the likes of China Evergrande Group, Bloomberg News reported. Feng Guoxun’s company is one such supplier. The 36-year-old says his advertising company is owed $200,000 by property developers including Evergrande, with those unpaid debts pushing him to the brink of bankruptcy.

Peru's economy is likely to have lost steam in October, the central bank said on Friday, estimating it would have grown between 4% and 6% in the period, the lowest rate since March, when the economy started rebounding from the pandemic, Reuters reported. Economic expectations from the business sector have also deteriorated, the bank's head of economic studies, Adrian Armas, said in a conference call. Peru on Thursday lifted its benchmark interest rate for the fifth month in a row, to 2.5% from 2%, amid persistent inflation.

Andalusian bankruptcy has grown by 37% in the first eleven months of 2021 although this is still slightly behind the national average of 40% that the data has shown so far, EuroWeeklyNews.com reported. There have been 456 business tenders leading up to November and in the same period an increase of 19% on dissolutions bringing that number to 3,288. The numbers come from a study by Informa D&B SAU (MSE), which is a Cesce subsidiary company. Regarding the month of November, the concursos in Andalusia have risen by 32%, to 50, and the dissolutions have done so by 8%, to reach 309.

Tunisia will continue to fulfil its foreign debt obligations and has started preparatory work for an IMF deal, Prime Minister Najla Bouden said on Friday, as talk of a possible default swirls among local and foreign analysts, Reuters reported. Her comments echo those of Finance Minister Sihem Boughdiri who said at an economic conference on Thursday that Tunisia was far from rescheduling its debts within the Paris Club, despite its financial difficulties.

Canada dramatically hardened its tone with Washington in a dispute over proposed U.S. credits for electric vehicles on Friday, threatening to slap tariffs on a range of American goods unless the matter was resolved, Reuters reported. In a letter to senior members of the U.S. Senate, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Trade Minister Mary Ng also said Canada was ready to launch a dispute settlement process under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade deal.

In the aftermath of disastrous floods last month that cut off Canada's main port, Ottawa will convene a summit of industry figures and shippers to discuss strengthening supply chains, a government source said on Sunday, Reuters reported. The event will take place in early 2022. Canadian transportation supply chains have been badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and the floods and landslides in the Pacific Coast province of British Columbia.

The number of corporate bankruptcies in Japan in November hit a 56-year low for the month, thanks to the government’s continued financing support amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a private survey showed on Wednesday, the Japan Times reported. The figure dropped 10.3% from a year before to 510, down for the sixth straight month, according to the survey by Tokyo Shoko Research Ltd. Total liabilities left by failed companies fell 7.8% to ¥94,101 million. The survey covered business failures involving liabilities of ¥10 million or more.

For weeks, global markets have been watching the struggles of China Evergrande, a teetering real estate giant weighed down by $300 billion or more in obligations that just barely seemed able to make its required payments to global investors. On Thursday, three days after a deadline passed leaving bondholders with nothing but silence from the company, a major credit ratings firm declared that Evergrande was in default, the New York Times reported. Instead of resolving questions about the fate of the Chinese behemoth, the announcement only deepened them.

State-owned water and sewerage utilities in Bulgaria are facing bankruptcy due to high electricity prices caused by the energy crisis. The government and regulatory authorities are trying to find the solution, but for now they have different views on the issue, BalkanGreenEnergyNews.com reported. Electricity prices on power exchange IBEX in Bulgaria have risen fivefold since January, from EUR 45 per MWh to about EUR 220.