Bloomberg Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades’s center-right Disy party recorded its worst results in parliamentary elections in 40 years, as voters vented their frustration over the government’s handling of the country’s “golden passport” program. With presidential elections due in 2023, support for Disy fell to between 24% and 28% compared with 30.7% in the last vote in 2016, according to initial ...

Bloomberg Malaysia announced a two-week nationwide lockdown to curb a relentless surge in Covid cases. Only essential economic and service sectors will be allowed to operate from June 1-14, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement, days after Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin had ruled out a repeat of last year’s lockdown. The government will soon announce an aid package ...

Bloomberg Germany’s Green party declined for a second consecutive week and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc clawed back support, four months before the country goes to the polls. Support for the Greens fell to 22% while Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc rose 1 percentage point to 25% in the weekly Insa poll for Bild am Sonntag. It was the second 1-point ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s virtual banks are facing years of red ink on the bottom line after making limited inroads against their brick-and-mortar rivals in the financial hub. The two leading digital banks so far, Mox Bank Ltd, backed by Standard Chartered, and ZA Bank Ltd, bankrolled by China’s ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance, predict they will start breaking even by 2024 ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG is grappling with how to keep top bankers from fleeing to competitors and drastically reducing risk as new Chairman Antonio Horta-Osorio seeks to recover from a series of scandals. The lender is cutting ties with SoftBank Group Corp, a backer to Lex Greensill’s collapsed supply-chain finance empire, and it’s temporarily barring clients from withdrawing all ...

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve has privately told Deutsche Bank AG that its compliance programs aren’t up to snuff, signalling that the scandal-plagued bank is failing to adhere to a number of past accords with US regulators. The Fed’s recent warning came in an annual regulatory assessment that said Deutsche Bank hadn’t improved its risk management practices despite being under confidential ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) will consider climate change in its monetary policy discussions, Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said in his clearest signal yet that the central bank is looking to support the battle against global warming. “We have a great interest” in climate change and its impact on the economy and the financial system, Kuroda said in an interview ...

Bloomberg The Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) monetary policy is appropriate given there’s no great risk of spiralling inflation, its President Thomas Jordan said in an interview with Schweiz am Wochenende (SamW). “We think the risk of inflation is moderate in Switzerland,” he told the newspaper in an interview. “The strong currency acts as a damper on inflation, the franc is ...

Bloomberg China’s central bank raised the limit on how much smaller lenders and foreign banks operating in the country can borrow offshore, a move that will ease a funding shortfall and give a push to expansion plans for firms such as HSBC Holdings. Their ability to borrow outside of China was expanded this week after the People’s Bank of China ...

Bloomberg Three of Asia’s best-performing stock markets this year are also ones where individual investors are playing out-sized roles, underscoring the growing influence of retail traders around the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Vietnam, where individuals account for about 90% of turnover and the VN Index has surged 20% in 2021, the most among major benchmarks in ...