Headlines

The International Monetary Fund’s board of directors turned down a request by Argentina to discuss relief on the commissions the country pays for its record loan, a setback for the government of President Alberto Fernandez, Bloomberg News reported. In an informal meeting held last month, the board rejected a proposal to discuss temporary relief on so-called surcharges, which are the commissions charged to countries that use the lender’s credit lines extensively.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Warsaw and other Polish cities late Sunday to oppose a court ruling that European Union legal judgments have become incompatible with the Polish constitution, a decision protesters fear could prompt Poland to follow the U.K. out of the bloc, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Mexico’s president presented details on Monday of a proposal that is likely to squeeze out hundreds of private power generating plants and may provoke complaints under the Mexico-U.S.-Canada free trade accord, the Associated Press reported. The constitutional reform presented by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador would cancel contracts under which 34 private plants sell power into the national grid. The plan declares “illegal” another 239 private plants that sell energy direct to corporate clients in Mexico.

After clearing a key vote in parliament, Malaysia is set to raise the limit on government debt for the second time in a little over a year as it seeks to fund additional pandemic support measures and bolster its economic recovery, Bloomberg News reported. A majority of lawmakers in the lower house voted for increasing the statutory debt ceiling to 65% of gross domestic product until end-2022, from 60%. The bill will next head to the senate, controlled by Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s coalition, before it’s signed into law by the king.

More than 130 countries have agreed on sweeping changes to how big global companies are taxed, including a 15% minimum corporate rate designed to deter multinationals from stashing profits in low-tax countries, the Associated Press reported. The deal announced Friday is an attempt to address the ways globalization and digitalization have changed the world economy. It would allow countries to tax some of the earnings of companies located elsewhere that make money through online retailing, web advertising and other activities.

Colombia’s process of normalizing monetary policy after a period of record low interest rates may take about 12 months, according to the governor of the central bank, Bloomberg News reported. “In principle what we know is that we’ll go through a process that may take a year or so, taking the interest rate to a more normal level,” Villar said. Last month, Villar and his colleagues raised the key interest rate for the first time in five years, lifting it a quarter percentage point to 2% as the economy rebounds from last year’s slump.

India’s central bank surprised markets by suspending its version of quantitative easing, signaling the start of tapering pandemic-era stimulus measures as an economic recovery takes hold, Bloomberg News reported. There’s no need for further bond-buying, Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das said in an online broadcast Friday, while stressing the step is not a reversal of its accommodative policy stance. The RBI will be ready to resume purchases if needed, he said. Bonds were mixed.

Tata Sons Pvt. was selected as the winning bidder for India’s flag carrier, ending decades of attempts to privatize a money-losing and debt-laden airline, and potentially ending years of taxpayer-bailouts that’s kept the company alive, Bloomberg News reported. Tata Sons, which originally launched Air India Ltd. with a namesake branding in 1932, bid 180 billion rupees ($2.4 billion) as an enterprise value for Air India, Tuhin Kanta Pandey, the top bureaucrat at India’s Department of Investment and Public Asset Management, said at a briefing Friday.

Grupo Aeromexico SAB sees emerging from Chapter 11 by the end of this year with an exit plan worth about $1.7 billion, Bloomberg News reported. The airline, which filed for bankruptcy protection in June 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic brought travel to a halt, filed a motion late Thursday to extend the period to issue a complete plan to Dec. 9. The step was taken “out of an abundance of caution” as it seeks to resolve pending matters. Aeromexico is “working fervently to resolve outstanding issues,” the airline said a filing to the court, some of which relate to its fleet.

The European Central Bank's two leading economic thinkers sparred on Thursday over how likely it was for the recent, sharp rise in euro zone inflation to become permanent, Reuters reported. Philip Lane and Isabel Schnabel, who lead the economic debate on the ECB's board, both repeated the ECB's official line that the spike in price growth would ease next year as the effects of a post-pandemic bounce fade. But they differed sharply on the risks surrounding that prediction, with Schnabel warning of "more persistent inflationary pressures" and Lane of forces that could drag down price growth.