Banking

Bloomberg The US government piled trillions of dollars of emergency funds into Americans’ accounts during the pandemic. That’s boosting the bottom lines of the banks that store their cash. Lending giants reported blockbuster profits this week, in part because stimulus payments have helped consumers bounce back from the Covid-19 crisis and prevented more severe economic damage. The emergency funds helped ...

Bloomberg Morgan Stanley surprised investors with a $911 million loss tied to the collapse of Archegos Capital Management, staining what was otherwise a record quarter for revenue and profit. “The current quarter includes a loss of $644 million related to a credit event for a single prime brokerage client, and $267 million of subsequent trading losses through the end of ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Thailand has responded to the US decision to keep the nation on watch for currency manipulation by asserting it has stepped into the market only to curb volatility in the baht. The central bank is committed to exchange-rate flexibility, with “interventions limited only to curbing excessive volatility and rapid movements of the baht on both sides,” ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG was sued by a small pension fund that alleges the bank misled investors and let “high-risk clients” including Greensill Capital and Archegos Capital Management take on too much leverage, in one of the first lawsuits since the twin debacles. The Michigan pension fund, City of St. Clair Shores Police & Fire Retirement System, filed the ...

Bloomberg A ruling slashing a record French fine against a bank seemed to bode well for UBS Group AG as it fights an even larger 3.7 billion-euro ($4.4 billion) penalty in front of the same judges. But the Swiss lender might be a victim of its own success. According to details of the April 6 decision only revealed earlier this ...

Bloomberg Switzerland’s central bank said it will continue with its policy of foreign-exchange interventions while seeking dialog with the US after the Biden administration dropped the country from its list of currency manipulators. The Treasury Department said that although the Swiss fulfilled the criteria for the manipulator label, there was “insufficient evidence” of the country trying to gain an unfair ...

Bloomberg Bank of Montreal (BMO) agreed to sell its Europe, Middle East and Africa asset-management unit to Ameriprise Financial Inc. for $847 million, marking Chief Executive Officer Darryl White’s biggest move yet to trim the bank’s portfolio of non-core businesses. The sale includes the opportunity for some US clients to move to Ameriprise’s Columbia Threadneedle Investments unit, subject to their ...

Bloomberg The 25 biggest US banks collectively reduced their loan holdings by 8% in the year through March, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest weekly survey. Total loans fall by $447 billion to $5.45 trillion, Fed data show. Meanwhile, total deposits, which provide the funds that banks lend out to borrowers, jumped 16% to $10.13 trillion. Their combined loan-to-deposit ratio ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG slashed the amount of money set aside for bonuses by hundreds of millions of dollars and used the savings to limit financial hit from the implosion of Archegos Capital Management, Financial Times (FT) reported. Cuts to bonus pool accruals and other one-off items added about $600 million to underlying profit before tax for the first ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is highly unlikely to deepen its negative interest rate without a fresh economic crisis on a massive scale, according to former board member Makoto Sakurai, whose term ended last month. “The BOJ didn’t lower rates” even at the height of the pandemic shock last year in March, Sakurai said in his first interview since ...