Headlines

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Lebanese authorities have started technical discussions to pull the country out of its crisis, a senior IMF official said, stressing the need to address the losses faced by the financial sector, Reuters reported. An IMF programme is widely seen as the only way Lebanon can unlock foreign financial help which it desperately needs to emerge from one of the world's sharpest economic depressions.

Indonesia's central bank kept its policy rates steady at record lows on Tuesday to support a tentative recovery, even as economic activity picked up in recent months thanks to rebounding consumption and robust commodity exports, Reuters reported. Bank Indonesia (BI) held the benchmark 7-day reverse repurchase rate steady at 3.50% for the eighth month, saying the decision was in line with the need to support the recovery while keeping the rupiah stable. All 29 analysts in a Reuters poll had expected the move.

Indonesia is preparing a backup plan for flag carrier PT Garuda Indonesia if it fails to reach a deal with creditors, including the option of upgrading air charter PT Pelita Air Service to a scheduled airline, Bloomberg News reported. The course of Garuda’s current talks with creditors hinges on a court decision on a debt petition against the airline, with the ruling set to be announced Thursday, Kartika Wirjoatmodjo, a deputy minister at the State-Owned Enterprises Ministry, said by text message on Tuesday.

Poland's prime minister repeatedly came under criticism during a tense debate in the European Parliament on Tuesday, with the EU's chief executive warning Warsaw that its challenge to the supremacy of the 27-nation bloc's law would not go unpunished, Reuters reported. "You're arguments are not getting better. You're just escaping the debate," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, visibly exasperated with Poland's Mateusz Morawiecki after more than four hours of back-and-forth.

Credit Suisse Group AG has agreed to pay nearly $475 million to American and British authorities to resolve charges in connection with Mozambican bond offerings, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The charges centered on the Zurich-based bank's role in a $2 billion scandal involving government-guaranteed loans. The SEC said Credit Suisse fraudulently misled investors and violated U.S. bribery laws in a scheme involving two bond offerings and a syndicated loan that raised funds on behalf of state-owned entities in Mozambique.

Dubai’s key tourism sector is unlikely to rebound for at least a year, according to S&P Global Ratings, Bloomberg News reported. While the city will witness a modest recovery this year helped by one of the world’s highest vaccination rates, “weak international tourism is likely to drag on the economy until late 2022 at the earliest,” Ratings Credit Analyst Trevor Cullinan said on Tuesday.

China's economy hit its slowest pace of growth in a year in the third quarter, hurt by power shortages and wobbles in the property sector, highlighting the challenge facing policymakers as they seek to prop up a faltering recovery while reining in the real estate sector, Reuters reported. Gross domestic product expanded 4.9% from a year ago, missing forecasts, as attempts by Beijing to curb lending to the property sector exacerbated the fallout from electricity shortages which sent factory output back to levels last seen in early 2020, when heavy COVID-19 curbs were in place.

India's central bank said on Monday that policy support is needed for longer for a sustained recovery in Asia's third largest economy from a coronavirus induced slowdown, even as demand has picked up, Reuters reported. Earlier this month, The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) monetary policy committee kept interest rates steady at record lows and reiterated the need to unwind pandemic-era stimulus only gradually to aid the nascent economic recovery.

The total value of registered debt owed by consumers in Ireland in the third quarter of this year three and a half times that of the same period in 2020 as interventions designed to protect households from the financial effects of Covid-19 were unwound, the Irish Times reported. The latest data from the Registry Trust data, which covers the third quarter, shows the number and total value of judgments registered against Irish consumers saw large rises over the period.

Italy has been asked to provide more than 7 billion euros ($8 billion) in capital to UniCredit to strike a deal over Monte dei Paschi and offload as much as possible of the state-owned bank to the stronger rival, Reuters reported. UniCredit, Italy's No. 2 lender, agreed on July 29 to discuss buying selected parts of Monte dei Paschi (MPS) from Italy's Treasury, which rescued the Tuscan bank in 2017, spending 5.4 billion euros. Under the terms of the bailout, Italy must cut its 64% stake in MPS by mid-2022 at the latest.