Headlines

Scotland’s leader said Monday that she will renew her push for independence from the United Kingdom next year, with the aim of holding a referendum on secession in 2023, the Associated Press reported. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the independence campaign, stalled by the pandemic, “will resume in earnest” in spring 2022, “COVID permitting.” “In the course of next year, I will initiate the process necessary to enable a referendum before the end of 2023,” Sturgeon told a conference of her Scottish National Party.

Inflation soared to a record high in Europe in November as a continued upward climb in energy costs pushed prices skyward, data showed on Tuesday, the New York Times reported. Annual inflation in the eurozone surged to 4.9 percent, the European statistics agency Eurostat reported, the highest since records began in 1997. Excluding volatile energy and food prices, inflation jumped by 2.6 percent from a year earlier, the highest in two decades.

Germany's incoming Finance Minister Christian Lindner on Tuesday vowed to champion solid public finances and a reduction of debt levels across the euro zone so that the European Central Bank (ECB) could fight inflation without hesitation if needed, Reuters reported. Lindner's comments, posted on Twitter, came after data showed on Monday that German consumer price inflation accelerated further in November to reach its highest level in nearly three decades. "The inflation gives rise to legitimate concerns.

Poland said Tuesday that consumer prices have risen 7.7% over the past year, evidence that inflation is accelerating even faster than had been expected in the largest central European economy in the European Union, the Associated Press reported. The November number is the highest inflation rate in 20 years and marks a larger jump than what economists had predicted. Last month, it hit 6.8% annually, according to the statistics office.

Canada’s big banks have weathered the pandemic on the strength of the country’s heated housing market. This week, they’ll get the chance to show whether they also have other avenues for loan growth, Bloomberg News reported. Surging home prices and strong sales have boosted Canadian residential mortgage and home-equity credit balances at the country’s six biggest banks by C$151.2 billion ($118.2 billion) in the past year and a half. That 13% growth outstrips the gain of just 2.8% for all other types of loans from the banks’ domestic divisions since before Covid-19 took hold in North America.

Indonesia’s central bank bought 58 trillion rupiah ($4 billion) of government bonds, the first transaction in its latest round of debt monetization, Bloomberg News reported. Bank Indonesia purchased 14.5 trillion rupiah each of four series of notes due in five to eight years via a private placement, the finance ministry’s debt management office said on Tuesday. Future bond-buying by the central bank will be done gradually, in line with the government’s need to fund its pandemic stimulus, the office said in a statement Tuesday.

Turkey’s top investigative body will focus on foreign currency purchases when it probes the reasons behind the lira’s plunge in November, Bloomberg News reported. Investigators from the State Supervisory Council will be authorized to seek prosecution if criminal activity is suspected, the person told Bloomberg on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity to disclose confidential details. The state-run Anadolu Agency, which first reported the impending probe on Saturday, said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the council to determine whether currency manipulation took place.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has superseded the board of Reliance Capital (RCL) and appointed former Bank of Maharashtra executive director Y Nageswar Rao as an administrator of the company, the Economic Times of India reported. The action by the central bank was taken "in view of the defaults by RCL in meeting the various payment obligations to its creditors and serious governance concerns which the board has not been able to address effectively," RBI said in a press release.

Brazilian airline Azul SA confirmed on Monday that it made an offer earlier this month to combine with Chile’s LATAM Airlines Group , which is in bankruptcy proceedings, but said it had since decided to focus on its own operations, Retuers reported. In an exchange filing published late on Sunday, Azul said that it would consider potential partnerships only in the future. The Brazilian airline said its non-binding proposal submitted on Nov. 11 had included around $5 billion in equity financing and was backed by some creditors of LATAM.

China’s property boom has spawned numerous developers that, like industry giant China Evergrande Group, borrowed heavily to fund breakneck growth. Now they are inflicting unprecedented losses on international investors as credit grows scarce and sales of new homes decline, the Wall Street Journal reported. Investors have dumped their bonds, setting off alarms over the companies’ finances. While Evergrande so far has been able to cobble together funds to make last-minute bond payments, at least four developers have reneged on their dollar bonds since early October.