Banking

Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) will extend its phase of faster bond-buying through the summer to ensure the economic rebound after coronavirus lockdowns morphs into a sustained recovery, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists. The majority expects the ECB to keep purchasing about 20 billion euros ($24.4 billion) worth of debt a week until September before slowing down. ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc and HSBC Holdings Plc are opening their offices fully in Hong Kong as a fourth wave of infections was contained and the US investment bank said half of its staff in the financial hub are now vaccinated. Both banks told staff that all employees would be permitted to return to their Hong Kong offices, in ...

Bloomberg A big portion of consumer deposits at retail banks could shift to digital currencies if governments start offering them, the Bank of England (BOE) indicated in a discussion paper about the issue. The UK central bank modeled the impact of introducing digital forms of money on the retail banking sector and in one scenario considered what would happen if ...

Bloomberg India’s foreign exchange reserves have by all indications crossed $600 billion, central bank chief Shaktikanta Das said, a huge buffer that will help insulate Asia’s third-largest economy from global spillovers and volatile external flows. Earlier this year, the country’s foreign-exchange reserves briefly surpassed Russia’s to become the world’s fourth-largest, as the Reserve Bank of India continued to hoard dollars ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc has begun hiring financial advisers as the lender looks to expand its wealth-management offerings around the globe. The firm is structuring compensation for the newly hired advisers in a way that gives Citigroup shareholders more power than wealth managers themselves, Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser said during a virtual investor conference. Generally, the wealth-management industry has been ...

Bloomberg Zimbabwe has threatened to ban traders from the country’s foreign-exchange (FX) auction platform for exploiting the gap between black-market and official currency prices. Authorities are dealing with an underground phenomenon that has the potential to “totally destabilise the Zimbabwean economy,” Deputy Finance Minister Clemence Chiduwa said in an op-ed in the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper. Companies and individuals could face ...

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp (BofA) Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan said the bank will put more capital into its sales and trading teams, after it took advantage of wild swings in the stock market during the pandemic. “On the sales and trading side, our team’s done a fantastic job,” Moynihan said at an Alliance Bernstein conference. “We’re putting more ...

Bloomberg India’s central bank expanded its version of quantitative easing (QE) and lowered its economic growth forecast as the world’s worst Covid-19 wave sweeps through the nation. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will buy an additional 1.2 trillion rupees ($16.4 billion) of bonds next quarter under the so-called Government Securities Acquisition Program 2.0, Governor Shaktikanta Das said. The program ...

Bloomberg Analysts from Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Bank of America Corp (BofA) see Brazil’s economy growing faster this year after a better-than-expected first quarter that was driven by investment and booming agriculture. Goldman increased its growth forecast for Latin America’s largest economy to 5.5% from 4.6%, while BofA raised its projections to 5.2% from 3.4%. “Concerns about the slowdown ...

Bloomberg The Swiss government said that existing liquidity requirements for the country’s systemically important banks, including UBS Group AG and Credit Suisse Group AG, are not enough. An analysis of the country’s most important banks revealed that the liquidity requirements currently imposed would probably not be enough to cover liquidity needs in an emergency or in a default event, the ...