Bloomberg Olaf Scholz is set to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor after forging an unprecedented alliance that aims to revamp Europe’s largest economy by tackling climate change and promoting digital technologies. After nearly two months of intense negotiations, Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats said they would present their agreement with the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats. Details of the ...
Read More »Admin
HSBC launches ESG indices that screen firms for biodiversity risk
Bloomberg Investors looking for ESG strategies have been handed a new group of indexes promising to focus on biodiversity by excluding companies that are found to pose a threat to nature. The Euronext ESG Biodiversity Screened Index series by HSBC Holdings, developed the product together with Euronext NV and Iceberg Data Lab SAS. The idea is to bring liquidity to ...
Read More »Atom Bank moves to four-day work week without cutting pay
Bloomberg Atom Bank has moved to a four-day working week, one of the most dramatic flexible working policies introduced by a finance firm since the pandemic upended office norms. The UK fintech, which has 430 employees, moved to a four-day week, the digital lender said in a statement. Contractual working hours will be reduced by 3.5 hours to 34 hours ...
Read More »Australia will closely monitor risk premiums to detect asset bubbles
Bloomberg Australia’s central bank will closely monitor risk premiums to judge whether asset prices appear “sensibly valued,†especially at a time of record low interest rates, said Marion Kohler, head of the domestic markets department. “Asset prices increase when risk-free rates are low, and this is part of the monetary transmission mechanism,†Kohler said in the text of a speech. ...
Read More »DBS faces second day of digital banking outages
Bloomberg DBS Group Holdings Ltd is facing a second day of outages in its online banking services, marking one of the worst digital disruptions for Southeast Asia’s biggest lender in a decade. The disruptions in DBS’s digital services — an area where the Singapore-based bank has invested in heavily — started early Tuesday and resurfaced on Wednesday. The problems stemmed ...
Read More »New Zealand’s central bank raises rates again
Bloomberg New Zealand’s central bank raised interest rates for the second time in two months and signalled it will need to tighten policy more quickly than previously expected to contain the inflation. The Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee lifted the official cash rate by a quarter percentage point to 0.75% on Wednesday, as expected by most economists. New forecasts published ...
Read More »Dollar rises to four-year high against yen
Bloomberg The dollar surged past a key level against the yen for the first time since 2017, as the renomination of Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair fuelled bets that the US might tighten policy more quickly. The dollar-yen climbed as much as 0.2% to 115.14 — a Japanese market holiday — surpassing the psychologically important 115 level. Treasury yields ...
Read More »Citi to recruit 100 people in push into digital assets
Bloomberg Citigroup Inc is looking to hire 100 people as part of a new push into digital assets inside its institutional business, according to a person familiar with the matter. As part of the effort, the firm tapped Puneet Singhvi to be its new head of digital assets inside the institutional-clients group, according to a memo to staff seen by ...
Read More »Treasury yields decline; oil advances despite reserves
Bloomberg US Treasuries rise as traders tempered their expectations for monetary-policy tightening after New Zealand’s measured approach to rate hikes. Oil prices climbed as producers and major consuming nations headed for a confrontation. Signals from the stock market were mixed, with the European benchmark opening higher while US index futures fell modestly. Energy stocks were among the best performers in ...
Read More »Bitcoin morphs back into risk asset as stock correlation climbs
Bloomberg Speculative stocks had a rough day, as did Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. To some market-watchers, that’s no coincidence. The 100-day correlation coefficient of Bitcoin and the S&P 500 stands at 0.33, among the highest readings of the year. That means that when stocks move up, Bitcoin is likely to do the same, and vice versa. (A coefficient of 1 ...
Read More »