Banking

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. (BofA) said it plans to repurchase $2.9 billion worth of stock this quarter, the most it can under new Federal Reserve guidelines. The buybacks come on top of its 18-cent dividend and $300 million in repurchases that offset stock awards, the bank said in a statement that came ahead of its fourth-quarter results. Bank of ...

Bloomberg Zimbabwean banks have closed about 17% of their branches as an escalation in the number of coronavirus infections spurs lenders to shut their doors for the time being and accelerate a digitisation drive. Of the 300 branches in the country, 10% were permanently closed last year due to the digitisation push. An additional 23 branches are now temporarily under ...

Bloomberg India’s troubled shadow banks face mounting challenges to a nascent recovery from pandemic, with their asset quality set to deteriorate further as flagged by the financial regulator. Non-performing assets already swelled in the most recent data to the highest in at least five years, at 6.3% as of March 2020 even before the worst of the pandemic impact, the ...

Bloomberg Philippine banks will recover faster from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic than they did from the Asian financial crisis due to record-low interest rates, higher capital and a stable economy, the head of the nation’s bankers group said. Lenders in the Southeast Asian nation may bounce back in three to four years — about half the time it ...

Bloomberg Bond traders in India are bracing for more turmoil as the central bank signals its intention to keep lifting money-market rates. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) offered a cutoff yield of 3.55% for a cash-draining operation, higher than traders had expected and a full 20 basis points above the lower boundary of its interest-rate corridor. “Future operations may ...

Bloomberg HDFC Bank Ltd., India’s largest private lender by assets, posted third-quarter profit that beat analyst expectations after earnings were buoyed by strong loan growth. Shares jumped. Net income was 87.6 billion rupees ($1.2 billion) in the three months through December compared with 74.2 billion rupees a year earlier, exchange filings showed. That beat the average estimate of 76.4 billion ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) upcoming policy assessment is likely to signal a pause in the bank’s buying of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as long as stocks stay buoyant, according to a key author of the BOJ’s ramped up asset-purchase plan to fight the pandemic. “The BOJ is likely to make a more comprehensive judgment on the amount and frequency ...

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc is preparing further job cuts as the emerging markets lender continues a restructuring that was postponed by the onset of the pandemic. The London-headquartered bank is expected to cut several hundred staff next month across its global businesses, with the reductions focused on more junior employees, according to people familiar with the matter. The bank has ...

Bloomberg Resurgent coronavirus outbreaks will vex central bankers on five continents this week as they weigh the threat of more damage to growth against the hope that mass vaccinations will reopen economies. Institutions meeting from Tokyo to Frankfurt to Ottawa are pondering the prospect of another lost quarter amid renewed lockdowns to contain the pandemic. Most are likely to maintain ...

Bloomberg Some of the world’s biggest banks are urging a US judge not to immediately terminate Libor after a group of borrowers filed suit claiming the benchmark was the work of a “price-fixing cartel.” Defendants in the case, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG, said in a November filing that an injunction abruptly ...