Bloomberg The US urged India to release political leaders detained without charge in its portion of Kashmir and to grant American diplomats regular access to the restive region. “I was pleased to see some incremental steps, including the partial return of internet service in Kashmir,” Alice Wells, the US State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs, ...

Bloomberg Four months after the shock dissolution of Peru’s Congress, President Martin Vizcarra’s gamble looks set to pay off once new lawmakers are elected on Sunday. Polls suggest the parliament will emerge more fractured but influenced by a set of centrist parties more open to the president’s path of political and judicial reform. At the same time, the opposition movement ...

Bloomberg Russian President Vladimir Putin’s longtime Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov, who was responsible for handling separatist forces in Ukraine, quit over unspecified policy differences, said his longtime ally Alexei Chesnakov. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was no official decree on Surkov’s resignation and that there had been no change in policy. The contradictory statements come at a time ...

Bloomberg The conflict between Poland and the European Union over democratic principles escalated overnight as the bloc’s highest official in Warsaw was summoned to the Foreign Ministry. Following an “unacceptable comment” by EU Commission spokesman Christian Wigand, the head of the commission’s office in the country was summoned to a meeting at the Polish Foreign Ministry, Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde warned investors not to assume that current monetary policy is locked in for the foreseeable future just because officials are focused on reviewing their strategy. “To those who think it’s on autopilot, that’s ridiculous,” she said in a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Let’s look at ...

Bloomberg American Express Co has high hopes for 2020, predicting earnings that surpassed many analysts’ expectations and prospects for “more rational” competition from its biggest rivals. After sweetening the bonuses on some of its most popular products, including the Green card, AmEx said overall rewards costs climbed 8% to $2.72 billion during the fourth quarter. That was less than the ...

Bloomberg Nigeria turned the screws even tighter on lenders by increasing the amount of money they need to park with the central bank for the first time in almost four years in an effort to tame inflation. The West African nation’s central bank raised the cash-reserve requirement for lenders to 27.5% of total deposits, from 22.5%, to curtail excess liquidity ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG and a Singapore based hedge fund bought more debt of an embattled Indian shadow lender, highlighting the growing foreign interest in the discounted assets of the financier at the center of a credit crisis. Deutsche Bank has almost doubled the debt it holds of Altico Capital India Ltd to 3 billion rupees ($42.1 million) in the ...

Bloomberg A rift among the global elite over the future of digital payments was on display during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. At stake is the potential overhaul of the global financial system that could see companies like Facebook Inc pitted against the world’s central banks in the race to develop a ...

Bloomberg A Swiss bank’s former chief executive officer has been sanctioned by the country’s financial regulator for insider trading in his wife’s name and what Finma called other “serious breaches of supervisory law.” The man executed the trades using his wife’s account at other lenders for several years, violating his bank’s internal directives, Finma said. The identities of the bank ...