Headlines

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission sees no broader systemic risk from the troubles at China Evergrande Group after keeping a close eye on the exposure of brokers and banks, its chief executive officer said, Bloomberg News reported. The financial watchdog has conducted frequent stress tests on its regulated financial institutions to assess their risks and balance sheet exposures “way before Evergrande,” Ashley Alder told reporters on Friday. “We have looked very very carefully at the institutional level, in particular exposures and expectations, in Hong Kong,” he said.

Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd. plans to sell property assets valued at almost $13 billion to raise capital after the cash-strapped Chinese developer flagged liquidity stress and missed payments on investment products, Bloomberg News reported. The company has put 18 projects covering 1.45 million square meters (15.6 million square feet) in Shenzhen up for sale, with a total value estimated at 81.82 billion yuan ($12.8 billion), according to people familiar with a briefing by Kaisa’s executives to retail investors on Thursday.

Housing costs may be adding more to euro zone inflation than once thought, European Central Bank policymaker Robert Holzmann said on Friday, weighing in on a key issue that has been a focus of policymakers this year, Reuters reported. When asked how much owner-occupied housing costs could increase headline inflation, Holzmann, Austria's central bank chief, said it could raise it by as much as a 0.5 percentage point. "I have heard 0.5 (percentage point), he told reporters.

Euro zone retail sales recorded an unexpected drop in September as Germany, the bloc's biggest economy, underperformed and non-food sales were also weak, data from Eurostat showed on Friday. Retail sales, a proxy for consumer demand, in the 19 countries sharing the euro, fell 0.3% month-on-month in September and were up 2.5% from a year earlier, the European Union's statistics office said.

The Biden administration’s deal to ease off steel and aluminum tariffs from Europe has won plaudits from much of U.S. industry, but a complex new quota system that comes with it has fueled concerns for small importers, the Wall Street Journal reported. The deal, announced during the Group of 20 summit last weekend, allows the European Union to export steel and aluminum duty free until reaching a quota of 3.3 million metric tons of steel and 384,000 metric tons of aluminum a year.

Australia's banking watchdog said it was examining the regulatory implications of Commonwealth Bank's (CBA)'s planned introduction of bitcoin trading to unsophisticated retail investors - the first bank in Australia to do so, Reuters reported. CBA says that it would welcome a clear regulatory framework for crytpocurrencies, which are not formally regulated in Australia.

The Irish High Court has approved a personal insolvency arrangement (PIA) allowing a woman to write off approximately €4.2m in debt owed to financial institutions, the Independent reported. Mr. Justice Mark Sanfey approved the PIA for 54-year-old Assumpta Gaffney, an accounts administrator with a construction firm, who is married with two dependent children. Under the terms of the PIA, Mrs. Gaffney will retain her family home at Mountain Lodge, Ballyleigh, Waterfall, Co Cork, for which she will continue to make mortgage repayments.

Covid support measures from the U.K. government were so speedily introduced that they created a fertile breeding ground for wrongdoing. Now, with schemes closed and reports last week indicating that a third of small businesses are “highly indebted”, we may begin to see much crime exposed as a result of insolvency, according to a commentary in The Times. Dealing with the fallout of this effectively and fairly is an immense and multifaceted task. In some cases, the solution is clear-cut; in others, the courts may be asked to stretch existing principles of law.

Tangled supply chains, rising costs for raw goods and soaring consumer demand have combined to push prices rapidly higher in many wealthy countries, prodding central banks around the world to start dialing back some of the extraordinary economic support measures they put in place during the pandemic, the New York Times reported. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced a plan to slow its large-scale asset purchases, a process its officials want to complete before lifting interest rates down the line.

The Bank of England’s decision Thursday not to raise interest rates sent bond markets into a tizzy, leading to the biggest moves in U.K. bond yields in years, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bank has said that it expects to raise borrowing costs soon, moving ahead of the Federal Reserve and other major central banks in withdrawing stimulus to tame inflation. But the bank held fire Thursday, surprising investors who had become convinced an increase was coming.