Bloomberg England’s third lockdown hit non-essential retailers harder than the previous one in November, with the new variant of the coronavirus hampering spending and confidence last month, according to the British Retail Consortium. Clothing and footwear stores fared particularly badly as retailers on the whole saw the value of sales decline from a year earlier, the business lobby said. A ...

Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will seek to buy more than 3 trillion rupees ($41 billion) of sovereign bonds in the next fiscal year to support the government’s borrowing plans, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. That will exceed the 3 trillion rupees the RBI is expected to spend for the current year ending March. ...

Bloomberg Societe Generale SA vowed to return capital to investors even as it ended its first losing year in more than three decades with a slump in trading. In contrast to double-digit trading gains at Wall Street peers, SocGen saw equities trading — its traditional strength — falls 7% from a year earlier and fixed-income revenue drop 16%. Net income ...

Bloomberg ABN Amro Bank NV scrapped its dividend for 2020 and posted its first annual loss in a decade as pandemic weighed on lending income and lender restructured its investment bank. An unexpected profit of about 54 million euros ($65 million) in the fourth quarter wasn’t enough to save the Dutch lender from its first negative result since 2010. The ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc. will refund an additional $4.2 million to some credit-card customers who were overcharged years ago. The bank reached an agreement with attorneys general from Pennsylvania, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey and North Carolina to refund the money to customers in those states. The refunds follow a 2018 settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in which Citigroup agreed ...

Bloomberg The entire wealth and asset management business of Nordea Bank Abp — which currently oversees about $425 billion — may exclude all investments that aren’t deemed sustainable in as little as half a decade. The unit is already “very close” to that goal, and will probably be “100% ESG” in “5 to 10 years,” Frank Vang-Jensen, Nordea’s chief executive, ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. made equity investments in six black-owned banks as part of a broader $50 million pledge to support minority-focused lenders. The San Francisco-based bank will assign dedicated teams to provide the lenders with financial, technology or product expertise, it said in a statement. Wells Fargo didn’t disclose the amounts of each investment. The lenders are: Broadway ...

Bloomberg Global stocks pushed forward on an eight-day winning streak on the heels of positive corporate news, improving virus trends and US stimulus plans. The MSCI World Index gained 0.2%, the longest advance since November. French investment bank Natixis SA surged 8% after financial group BPCE SA offered to buy out minority shareholders. Tencent Holdings Ltd. drove strong gains in ...

Bloomberg Exchange-traded fund (ETF) investors are dumping Treasuries in a hurry as bets on a global rebound in inflation build across asset classes. Roughly $639 million was pulled from the $15.7 billion iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (ticker TLT), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That was the fund’s biggest single-day outflow since March, when the coronavirus pandemic fuelled a ...

Bloomberg A P Moller-Maersk A/S, the world’s largest container carrier, unveiled an outlook that disappointed the market amid signs freight rates are close to peaking. Shares in the Copenhagen-based company slumped about 8% when trading started in the Danish capital. Underlying Ebitda for 2021 is expected to rise to between $8.5 billion and $10.5 billion, the Copenhagen-based company said on ...