One year after she predicted massive oil-sands-fueled surpluses, Alberta Premier Alison Redford is taking on debt and rolling out an austerity budget – one that flat-lines spending, abandons many of her election promises and will see the province borrow $12-billion over three years for infrastructure projects, The Globe and Mail reported. Ms. Redford’s budget, tabled Thursday, signals tough times ahead for Canada’s richest province, due in large part to forecasts of plunging oil revenue that would, ultimately, also affect the federal government’s bottom line.

For the first time in a year, Canada’s central bank on Wednesday signalled comfort with the trajectory of household debt, a shift that will allow policy makers to focus more tightly on signs of deteriorating economic growth, The Globe and Mail reported. In a revised policy statement, the Bank of Canada dropped language that was intended to signal a willingness to raise borrowing costs to curb a surge in household borrowing to record levels.

Mexico's Vitro said on Monday it had ended a lengthy legal fight with creditors after a Mexican businessman bought a chunk of the glassmaker's debt held by funds that had led the court fight, Thomson Reuters News & Insight reported. Under the deal, Monterrey-based businessman David Martinez' Fintech fund will buy all the debt held by U.S. hedge funds that were fighting Vitro in court over payment, the company said in a statement.

Argentina has greeted an order from a US appeals court for more information on its offer to holdout creditors as a glimmer of hope in its fight not to pay “vulture funds” without a steep writedown on their debt, the Financial Times reported. “We are not trying to convince the vultures to participate, we are trying to convince the judges, and that’s why it’s a good sign that the court has asked Argentina what the 2010 offer means,” Hernán Lorenzino, the economy minister, told the newspaper Página 12.

PT Berlian Laju Tanker Tbk, the Indonesian operator of 72 tankers, won't be permitted to proceed in U.S. bankruptcies while keeping all papers sealed and withheld from the public, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stuart Bernstein ruled at a hearing, StamfordAdvocate.com reported on a Bloomberg story. Gramercy Distressed Opportunity Fund II along with two sister funds filed an involuntary Chapter 11 petition against the PT Berlian parent in December. The company responded by asking Bernstein to dismiss the involuntary case.

Memory chipmaker Micron said the Tokyo district court issued an order approving its acquisition of Japanese memory chipmaker Elpida after creditors agreed to the plan, Reuters reported. Boise, Idaho-based Micron, which is losing money due to a crumbling PC industry, wants to create larger economies of scale and offered in July to buy Elpida for about $750 million in cash and to pay creditors a total of $1.75 billion in annual installments through 2019. Elpida's creditors voted to approve the deal on Tuesday, Micron said.

The economic crises in the United States and Europe wiped out decades of progress in expanding the world financial system, depressing the flow of investments and loans across borders and potentially setting the stage for an epoch of entrenched low growth, according to a new study on global finance patterns, The Washington Post reported. The McKinsey Global Institute report combines databases from the International Monetary Fund, global central banks and other sources to try to sum up what has been lost in the aftermath of the 2008 Lehman Bros.

B.C. Finance Minister Mike de Jong has resorted to corporate and personal income taxes hikes for the first time in his party’s 12 year reign, on the eve of an election that threatens to unseat the B.C. Liberal government, The Globe and Mail reported. In his quest to deliver a $197-million surplus budget in advance of the May 14 election, Mr. de Jong has abandoned a long-standing commitment to driving economic growth through tax cuts to business and high income earners.

The Official Stanford Investors Committee and the court-appointed receiver of Allen Stanford's financial empire have sued Antigua and Barbuda, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and 23 former Stanford Financial Group Co executives, accusing them of assisting in the financier's $7 billion (4.5 billion pounds) Ponzi scheme, Reuters reported. The committee is seeking at least $90 million of transfers to Antigua, according to the complaint filed on February 15 in U.S. Federal Court in Dallas. It also is seeking punitive damages.

The government of Belize proposed new terms to restructure the country's $544 million in debt Tuesday in an offer that extended the maturity of the debt and reduced coupon payments, Dow Jones reported. In an address to the nation's House of Representatives, Prime Minister Dean Barrow said the terms of the new plan extend the defaulted bond's maturity to 2038, from 2029, while they reduce the coupon to 5%, from 8.5%. The agreement would provide the country $247 million in relief over the next 10 years, Mr. Barrow said.