Sweden

Europe’s biggest debt collector says an increase in volumes in Sweden and Norway could be an early indication that households are starting to struggle paying off their consumer loans after debt burdens swelled to records, Bloomberg News reported. Volumes under Intrum AB’s existing credit-management services contracts in the two countries, in which it collects money from non-paying clients of financial institutions, grew by more than 15 percent in the first half of the year.

The property market has fallen a little closer to Earth: prices dropped by 9% between September and January, largely because of a surfeit of pricey new flats. They then steadied, and are around 5% below the peak—and 50% higher than at the start of 2013, calculates Valueguard, a data provider. As Swedes have borrowed to buy, their debts have risen, The Economist reported. Finansinspektionen (FI), the financial-stability supervisor, estimates that borrowers’ debts rose by 36% between 2012 and 2017, while disposable incomes went up by 13%.

The financial industries of Sweden and Denmark were quick to criticize the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s completed framework on Thursday, arguing it will hit Scandinavian lenders too hard, Bloomberg News reported. “The Basel standards will, if they are fully implemented in the EU and Sweden, have large negative effects for Swedish banks, their clients and the Swedish economy,” Hans Lindberg, the head of the Swedish Bankers’ Association, said in a statement on Thursday.

The 6,000 job cuts announced last week at Nordea Bank AB are just a down payment for an industry facing radical overhaul, says Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull. “If somebody says, where are we, or where are banks, 10 years from now, banks could easily have half what they have today,” in terms of personnel, von Koskull said in an interview in London on Friday. Nordea last week stunned unions, analysts and investors when it revealed the staff reductions, which amount to well over a tenth of the work force of the Swedish bank, Bloomberg News reported.

Ericsson's Indian subsidiary has filed insolvency petitions against Reliance Communications and two of its companies to recover unpaid dues, the Indian mobile operator said in a stock exchange filing on Wednesday, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The Swedish telecoms equipment maker, which signed a seven-year deal in 2014 to operate and manage Reliance Communications' nationwide network, is seeking a total of 11.55 billion rupees ($180 million) from the three companies, the filing said.

A European banking giant just snubbed one of the world’s strictest financial supervisors by moving to a more accommodating regulatory setting, Bloomberg News reported. Nordea Bank AB’s decision to relocate its headquarters from Sweden to Finland puts the Nordic region’s only global systemically important bank inside the euro zone. After months of railing against Swedish efforts to make banks pay more to protect taxpayers, Nordea estimates its decision to go to Helsinki will save it as much as $1.3 billion in regulatory costs.

When the biggest Nordic bank turned its subsidiaries into branches, regulators in Finland, Denmark and Norway complained they were left with too-big-to fail operations but no power to rein them in. Oversight was instead left to Sweden. But the full consequences of Nordea Bank AB’s decision to consolidate its Nordic operations are only gradually becoming clear, Bloomberg News reported. In a step that’s expected to be copied elsewhere in the European Union, Stockholm-based Nordea’s restructuring was completed on Jan. 1 after long talks with the relevant Nordic authorities.

The crisis at Ericsson deepened on Wednesday when the world’s biggest maker of mobile network equipment reported a 94 per cent plunge in quarterly operating profit and tumbling sales, the Irish Times reported. The Swedish company is struggling with a drop in spending by telecoms companies, with new 5G technology still years away, and stiff competition from Finland’s Nokia and China’s Huawei. Its shares dropped more than 15 per cent to an eight year low in early trading after it missed analysts’ forecasts for a fifth straight quarter, and said it saw no sign of a quick upturn.

Ericsson AB plans to cut 3,000 jobs in Sweden, a fifth of the workforce in its home country, as it curbs production to cope with shifting technology and stagnant demand for wireless-network equipment. The company will reduce manufacturing in the towns of Boraas and Kumla - a move it signalled last month - as it turns its focus to software development, the Irish Times reported.

The Swedish Riksbank is increasingly nervous that its 16-month experiment with negative interest rates is yielding the kind of undesired byproduct that textbooks often predict: a real-estate bubble. Stockholm has become one of Europe’s hottest property markets, one where prices rose 14% last year and money keeps flowing thanks to the central bank’s ultraloose interest rate of minus-0.5%. To cool demand for mortgage loans, the Riksbank had been planning to start increasing interest rates by the middle of next year.