Banking

Bloomberg Morgan Stanley is doubling down on its efforts to help Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. replicate the US lender’s highly successful wealth management business in Japan, where competition to serve rich clients is intensifying. The New York-based lender has dispatched Darren Spencer, the former chief operating officer of Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management, to Tokyo to train staff and ...

Bloomberg French prosecutors and lawyers for the government said UBS Group AG should be ordered to pay $3.6 billion — 33% less than the original judgment — for allegedly helping French clients hide money from the nation’s tax authorities. Prosecutor Serge Roques asked a Paris court of appeals to impose a 2 billion-euro fine on UBS, acknowledging the limits set ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG CEO Thomas Gottstein signalled he’d consider further separating the asset-management unit from the rest of the bank after the Greensill Capital collapse, as he steps up efforts to limit the reputational damage from the supply-chain finance scandal. Making asset management an independent entity is “potentially part of the plan,” Gottstein said in a Bloomberg Television ...

Bloomberg China appointed two new economists to its central bank monetary policy committee with expertise in the labour market and population, suggesting an increased focus on boosting jobs and household incomes. Cai Fang, a well-known economist at the government-linked Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Wang Yiming, a former deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council, ...

Bloomberg India is set to face its first test of demand for a riskier type of bank bond since the regulator introduced a cap on mutual funds’ investments in such securities. One of the nation’s largest regional lenders, Bank of Maharashtra, is seeking bids Monday for rupee-denominated Tier 2 notes in a sale that will be closely watched to gauge ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) finally delivered on its promise to boost the pace of emergency bond-buying to combat the economic threat from higher yields. Net purchases settled last week climbed by 21.1 billion euros ($25.2 billion), the most since the start of December. German bonds held marginally higher on the day, with 10-year yields dropping one basis point ...

Bloomberg The Swiss National Bank (SNB) spent 110 billion francs ($118 billion) on interventions in 2020, evidence of heightened market activism that risks fueling more tension with the US. The tally is the highest since 2012 and indicates officials purchased currency worth 9 billion francs in the fourth quarter, when the US Treasury branded Switzerland a currency manipulator. Such eye-watering ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc reopens its main Hong Kong office on Monday, after being closed last week in the wake of three people testing positive for coronavirus (Covid-19). “Precautionary measures — such as wearing masks, pre-entry temperature screening, hand sanitisers, spaced queuing and portable acrylic screens at open banking counters — will continue to be in place,” according to a ...

Bloomberg The European Union’s top banking regulator urged lenders to promptly write off loans that are failing in the aftermath of the pandemic, warning that without action “zombie” firms could damage the economic recovery. Jose Manuel Campa, chairman of the Paris-based European Banking Authority, said in an interview on March 19 that regulators expect non-performing loans to “increase to a ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG plans to triple its headcount in China over the next three years, ramping up its ambitions to gain market share as the nation’s financial market opens. “We are planning to more than triple our presence in term of headcount in China over the next 3 years and look forward to strengthening our position,” Chief Executive ...