Bloomberg Tunisians went to the polls on Sunday with the major political parties looking to rebound from their defeat by outsiders in last month’s presidential vote by securing a strong position in the powerful parliament. Choosing the 217-member assembly has traditionally been the principal election in the North African country since its 2011 uprising ushered in democracy. But the shock ...
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Trump impeachment fight lurks
Bloomberg Even before the prospect of impeaching Donald Trump arose, the US Supreme Court term that opens on Monday was going to thrust the justices into the nation’s political wars in the run-up to next year’s election. In its first full term with two Trump appointees, the court is planning to hear fights over deportation protections and gun regulations. The ...
Read More »France to step up intel screening after attack
Bloomberg France will take steps to improve screening after a suspected terrorist attack in Paris in which a police employee knifed four colleagues to death and hurt two more, raising questions about national security. The government will set up two task forces to make proposals by the end of the year to improve screening at the Paris police department intelligence ...
Read More »IndusInd, hit by India’s shadow bank stress, says worst is over
Bloomberg IndusInd Bank, which saw a fifth of its market value wiped out over the past week on concern about its creditors, says the crisis of confidence engulfing India’s financial system is fading away. Outstanding loans to overstretched borrowers dipped at the Mumbai-based bank last quarter, lenders including IndusInd are working to resolve defaults at Dewan Housing Finance Ltd, and ...
Read More »RBA tells banks not to be strict after rates cut
Bloomberg Australia’s central bank joined the government in warning lenders not to be too strict when assessing borrowers, fearing such caution could dent an already slowing economy. “It is important that banks are not overly cautious in the implementation of current lending policies,†the Reserve Bank of Australia said in its Financial Stability Review. “Lending always entails a degree of ...
Read More »Danske non-resident unit ‘banker’ speaks out
Bloomberg Between 2009 and 2015, Mihhail Murnikov spent his days handling as many transactions as he could at the non-resident unit of Danske Bank in Estonia. Roughly a year after Danske admitted that those transactions were part of a $220 billion money laundering scandal, prosecutors from Tallinn to Washington are still trying to get to the bottom of what really ...
Read More »Former Credit Suisse CEO calls negative rates ‘crazy’
Bloomberg Oswald Gruebel, who led both of Switzerland’s two biggest banks during his career, criticised negative interest rates and argued they’d lead to a further decline of the country’s financial sector. “Negative interest rates are crazy. That means money is not worth anything anymore,†Gruebel said in an interview with Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag. “As long as we have ...
Read More »$63b of zombie buildings sound alarm for Indian banks
Bloomberg Ashish Shah is caught in the middle of India’s latest financial crisis. As chief operating officer of Radius Developers, he’s struggling to fund construction of apartment complexes because of a liquidity crunch in the nation’s bloated shadow-banking sector. “Real estate is a sitting duck,†said Shah. “The timing is very crucial as the slowdown has hit the real estate ...
Read More »Austria’s elections show future of Germany
Austria just held an election that indicates a new direction for European politics: Increasingly, the center right might find itself working with the Greens. The 33-year-old Sebastian Kurz, the winner of last week’s election, is more than a successful small-country politician. He’s a weathervane for all of Europe. Two years ago, he scored a difficult victory for his Austrian People’s ...
Read More »Macron wants to scan your face
It’s an interesting twist of fate that the European governments whose job it is to enforce sweeping new data-protection laws, rolled out to curb intrusive tech firms like Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., are increasingly finding their own digital ambitions tripped up by them. Earlier this year, Ireland’s plan for a national “public services card†was deemed illegal by its ...
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