Bloomberg Troops from Mozambique and Rwanda retook a port town at the heart of a four-year insurgency that led to the suspension of a $20 billion project by TotalEnergies SE. Soldiers from the two countries retook Mocimboa da Praia, which insurgents with ties to IS have held for a year, the Rwanda Defence Force said in Twitter post. The Mozambican ...

Bloomberg China has punished a slew of officials for failing to curb a Covid-19 outbreak that’s spawned nearly 900 symptomatic infections across the country in less than a month, a resurgence that complicates Beijing’s strategy of keeping the virus out entirely. The eastern Chinese city of Yangzhou issued warnings to five officials for mishandling mass testing that they said allowed ...

Bloomberg Australians’ approval of Prime Minister Scott Morrison has fallen to the lowest level since the pandemic began, with voters wearying of virus-induced lockdowns amid his government’s tardy vaccine rollout. Support for Morrison’s handling of the crisis has fallen from 85% in April last year —when his conservative government imposed strict border controls that helped keep virus fatalities to less ...

Bloomberg The pound is about to enter a new era of strength against the euro, thanks to the Bank of England’s (BOE) hawkish turn. Traders have raised the odds of a rate hike in February to 60% after the BOE made clear last week that it’s beginning a countdown to end the era of rock-bottom borrowing costs. And it’s given ...

Bloomberg Ecuador’s central bank doubled its emergency credit line with the Bank for International Settlements to $840 million as a precautionary measure in case of a downturn, its governor said in an interview. The credit line is part of efforts to strengthen the bank after previous administrations used its funds for government spending, Guillermo Avellan said. Those actions hurt the ...

Bloomberg The creation of central bank digital currencies to address economic inequality with new retail loan and payments channels must be designed so they don’t “cannibalise” a country’s commercial financial system, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. If set up hastily, retail CBDCs could risk “disintermediating commercial banks” and lead to the exodus of 20% to 30% of their funding ...

Bloomberg Westpac Banking Corp has agreed to sell its life insurance unit to Dai-ichi Life Holdings Inc’s Australian subsidiary TAL for $660 million as Australia’s second-largest lender continues to jettison non-core assets to focus on lending. The completion of the transaction, confirming an earlier Bloomberg report, is expected to happen in the second half of next year, Westpac said. Under ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc has sold the first of 13 markets Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser put on the block, agreeing a deal to offload its Australian consumer unit to National Australia Bank Ltd. The Australian lender will pay the US bank cash for the net assets of the Citigroup Consumer Business plus a premium of A$250 million ($184 million), according ...

Bloomberg India’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged at a record low to support the economy, even as a split appeared among policy makers on continuing with the lower-for-longer stance. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) six-member Monetary Policy Committee retained its main repurchase rate at 4%, as predicted by all 29 economists in a Bloomberg survey. Policy makers voted ...

Bloomberg Stocks were steady with US futures on Monday, while commodities tumbled as investors weighed concerns about a pullback in stimulus and a resurgence in the fast-spreading delta virus variant. The Stoxx 600 Index traded little changed as gains in technology firms offset declines in energy shares and miners. Crude oil extended last week’s decline — its worst since October ...