London / AFP The British government pledged on Saturday to match European Union funding for farmers, universities and infrastructure projects following Brexit, as it sought to allay fears over key sectors. The commitment, intended to address uncertainty arising from the June 23 vote to quit the bloc, could cost £4.5 billion a year, finance minister Philip Hammond said. The ...

  New Delhi / Bloomberg State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender by assets, climbed to an eight-month high in Mumbai stock trading as the firm reported a smaller increase in soured debt than expected in the first quarter. Bad loans as a percentage of total lending rose 44 basis points since March to 6.94 percent by June, the ...

  Singapore / Bloomberg The recent drubbing in Singapore bank stocks is turning Southeast Asia’s biggest lenders into bargains for money managers including Aberdeen Asset Management Plc. DBS Group Holdings Ltd. lost S$3.6 billion ($2.7 billion) in market value in seven days from July 28 when its client Swiber Holdings Ltd. signaled it was in financial trouble. DBS’s two smaller ...

  Bloomberg Kenyan lawmakers are threatening to overrule President Uhuru Kenyatta if needed to force the country’s banks to lower their lending rates. The country’s parliament on July 28 approved a bill that will limit the amount of interest banks can charge on loans, with the proposal only needing Kenyatta’s signature to become law. The proposals jolted lenders into signing ...

  La Paz / AFP Banco Bradesco SA, Brazil’s second-biggest bank by market value, named former executives of HSBC Holdings Plc’s local unit to new leadership positions as its acquisition of the business last month expands the investment-banking team 20 percent. Ricardo Lanfranchi, former head of Brazil equity sales for HSBC, is now global head of equities and derivatives for ...

  There’s a very deep, important concept in economics that gets way too little attention from the public (and possibly from economists themselves). This is the idea of asymmetric information. The concept has been around for decades, and research about it has won Nobel prizes, but neither the profession nor the public has ever put it at the center of ...

  Leonid Bershidsky Another Tesla has crashed because the driver thought its self-driving technology could actually drive the car. As we read all the stories about magical technology and then use the hyped-up products, we ought to keep in mind that the “magic” hits the market long before they live up to their promise, which in some cases they will ...

  It’s a measure of international investors’ desperation that they are long the Russian ruble and other Russian assets. Even though fears of a major Russian onslaught in Ukraine are likely to prove unfounded, there’s nothing about the Russian economy that can support an asset boom, and it’s only a matter of time before the central bank is compelled to ...

  Bloomberg Checkout lines at most American retailers were noticeably shorter in July as sales stalled following one of the strongest quarters in years, indicating consumer spending will cool in the third quarter. The Commerce Department said purchases totaled $457.7 billion last month, little changed from the $457.9 billion in June. That reflected declining receipts at eight of 13 major ...

  Bloomberg United Continental Holdings Inc. won approval for a new contract with flight attendants and reached an “agreement in principle” with mechanics, setting the stage for labor peace for the first time since the 2010 merger that created the airline. The Association of Flight Attendants voted 53 percent in favour of a five-year pact that raises top pay rates ...