Mexico’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged for a fourth straight meeting and increased its inflation projections for next year, a sign that borrowing costs could stay higher for longer, Bloomberg News reported. Banxico, as the central bank is known, voted to hold the key rate at 11.25% on Thursday, matching the forecasts of all 23 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

Ebix Inc. Chief Executive Officer Robin Raina received a $1.8 million bonus last week, even as a Sept. 30 deadline looms for the company to repay a loan of more than $600 million to a syndicate of US banks without having the cash on hand, Bloomberg News reported. Ebix, based in Johns Creek, Ga., disclosed the bonus in a regulatory filing Monday. It said that $1.2 million of the bonus was paid on Sept. 19, the day the board awarded it to Raina. The remainder will be paid in October, according to the filing.

Canada’s banking regulator said he’s concerned about the prevalence of ultra-long mortgages and that his agency is working with lenders to stem the ubiquity of such loans, Bloomberg News reported. The country’s banks have about C$250 billion ($185 billion) of mortgages with amortization periods — the length of time permitted to pay off the loan — that sit at 35 years or longer, according to Peter Routledge, the superintendent of financial institutions.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony said Thursday that it had filed for bankruptcy just days after canceling its 2023-24 season, leaving dozens of musicians and staff facing an uncertain future, the Global and Mail reported. The 78-year-old Southern Ontario symphony said earlier this week that it needed to raise $2-million immediately in order to keep operating, acknowledging that insolvency was a possible outcome. The organization confirmed it had filed for bankruptcy in a press release late Thursday afternoon.

Mexico's headline inflation eased in the first half of September, official data showed on Friday, with the president calling on the central bank to focus on promoting economic growth given the improving inflation data, Reuters reported. Headline inflation in Latin America's second-largest economy hit 4.44% in the 12 months through early September, down from 4.64% at the end of August, data from statistics agency INEGI showed.

Canadian consumers appear to be quickly rolling back their spending as the Bank of Canada’s higher interest rates start to bite into more household budgets, Bloomberg News reported. Receipts for retailers dropped 0.3% in August, the first decline since March, according to an advance estimate from Statistics Canada released Friday. That followed a 0.3% increase a month earlier, which missed the median estimate of 0.4% in a Bloomberg survey. Sales rose in seven of the nine subsectors in July, and were led by increases at food and beverage retailers.

Canadian autoworkers ratified a new labor agreement with Ford Motor Co. on Sunday, averting a threatened strike and potentially setting a precedent that could play out in the United Auto Workers' strike at automaker facilities in the U.S., the Associated Press reported. The new agreement raises base hourly pay for production workers by almost 20% over three years, and by more than 25% for trade workers, the Canadian autoworker union Unifor said. It also gives permanent workers a $10,000 bonus and adds a cost-of-living adjustment, a mechanism that adjusts wages in line with inflation.

Drugmaker Mallinckrodt said on Thursday that it had initiated examinership proceedings in the High Court of Ireland, as it seeks protection from actions taken by creditors during the chapter 11 bankruptcy process, Reuters reported. The Ireland-based company filed for its second bankruptcy in the United States last month, with a restructuring plan that would cut $1 billion from what it owes to victims of the U.S. opioid crisis. Read more.

The Bank of Canada on Tuesday said recent volatility in headline inflation is not unusual but the underlying trend shown by core measures was inconsistent with bringing inflation down to the 2% target, Reuters reported. Earlier on Tuesday, August inflation figures showed a jump in the headline number to 4.0% from 3.3% in July - higher than most analysts had forecast - on rising gasoline prices. "Ups and downs of the size we've seen in the past couple of months are not that unusual," Deputy Governor Sharon Kozicki said in a speech at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan.