Stephen and Stitt — the iconic HSBC Holdings Plc lions — are crouching and ready to pounce. Adjusted profit from Asian operations jumped 8.5 percent from a year earlier to $4.76 billion in the first-quarter results showed last week. That’s even as ho-hum performance everywhere else dragged down return on equity to an annualized rate of 7.5 percent, a drop ...

A friend of mine who is a bit of a climate-change skeptic once challenged me with this question: If climate change is such a pressing danger, why haven’t coastal real estate prices crashed? It’s a fair question. If financial markets are even close to efficient, and if everyone knows climate change is about to flood the coasts, then it stands ...

Bloomberg For years, Asia’s biggest private banks have been on a hiring spree to keep pace with the ranks of newly minted millionaires. Now, they’re squeezing more out of their bankers. Relationship managers who cater to wealthy clients in the region are running larger pools of money, with average assets run by each surging to an all-time high of $341 ...

Bloomberg Stocks down for a third successive week, bond yields at their highest since 2016 and a currency market replete with bears. Such have been the declines in emerging markets that the more sanguine commentators have begun saying the selloff has run its course and it may even be time to buy the dip. But JPMorgan Chase & Co. says ...

Bloomberg Sovereign bonds in India rallied after the central bank said it will purchase debt to meet the cash needs of the banking system. The Reserve Bank of India said it would buy 100 billion rupees ($1.5 billion) of securities with maturities ranging from 2020 to 2033 maturities on May 17. The purchases comes after the shortest bond on sale ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank warned that a rise in trade protectionism would undermine the global economy, and said the US would be among the worst-affected. The cautionary comments coincide with data showing factory orders in Germany unexpectedly slid for a third month in March, another sign of the weakness that’s dogged the euro-area economy since the start of the ...

Bloomberg Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC) shares fell the most in a month after the Singaporean bank posted first-quarter profit growth that relied largely on a drop in loan provisions as lending margins stagnated. Southeast Asia’s second-largest bank slid as much as 3.2 percent in Singapore on Monday morning after Chief Executive Officer Samuel Tsien signaled that last quarter’s decline in ...

Bloomberg China’s $42 trillion financial sector is set to open up to the world like never before. To deliver on longstanding pledges and help stave off the threat of tariffs from US President Donald Trump, Chinese officials have set a June 30 deadline to ease ownership and business restrictions for banks, securities firms, asset managers and life insurers. Securities firms ...

Bloomberg Starbucks Corp. is giving Nestle SA a shot at revitalising its global coffee business. In the third-biggest transaction in Nestle’s 152-year history, the Swiss food giant will spend $7.15 billion for the right to market Starbucks-branded products from beans to capsules, marrying its international distribution network with the allure of arguably the biggest name in java. Nestle won’t get ...

Bloomberg Africa’s leading online shopping platform, Jumia, wants to make Egypt its biggest market on the continent, and it’s turning to an unexpected corner for help: the country’s vast network of unlicensed vendors. Often touted as Africa’s answer to online retail giant Amazon, Jumia wants 10-fold growth in revenue from Egypt and six-fold growth in the number of products offered ...