Banking

Bloomberg China plans to allow some commercial banks to start selling soured personal loans to distressed asset managers as soon as this month, according to people familiar with the matter. At a meeting by the official credit assets transfer center, banks and state-run bad-loan managers were asked to accelerate preparations to ensure a smooth start of the trial program in ...

Bloomberg Rising corporate debt and the prospect of further Covid-19 lockdowns pose a systemic risk to France’s financial system that may rise in the coming months, according to the country’s central bank. Debts of non-financial companies are now the greatest vulnerability in the system, the Bank of France said in its semi-annual review of financial risks. While the second lockdown ...

Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) said it’s investigating an illegal breach of a third-party file sharing service used to share and store some sensitive information. While the breach has been contained, the nature and extent of the information that potentially had been accessed is being determined and may have included some commercially and personally sensitive data, Governor ...

Bloomberg India’s Home First Finance Co. is seeking to raise as much as 2.5 billion rupees ($34 million) from an initial public offering (IPO) in the next few weeks as the mortgage provider backed by Warburg Pincus LLC taps rising demand for housing. The country’s first non-bank mortgage lender to sell shares in over two years will offload about a 25% ...

Bloomberg Overseas-Chinese Banking Corp. (OCBC) named Helen Wong as Singapore’s first female bank chief executive officer (CEO), putting her in charge of leading the island state’s second-largest lender through a severe economic downturn brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Wong, 59, is replacing Samuel Tsien who will retire in April after running OCBC since 2012, the bank said in a ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s volatile currency caught Citigroup Inc. in a wrong-way bet within a day. The New York-based lender recommended a short-dollar position versus the rand, betting the South African currency would strengthen along with emerging-market peers as uncertainty around fiscal stimulus in the US weighed on the dollar. Instead, the rand plunged more than 2% as traders fretted about ...

Bloomberg Morgan Stanley’s investment management arm boosted a stake in Bitcoin vehicle MicroStrategy Inc. to more than 10% late last year. The bank unit held 792,627 shares of MicroStrategy by the end of December, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The 10.9% stake had a value of roughly $420 million based on the day’s closing ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG has cut relationships with a number of Venezuela’s wealthy as it weighs the risk of doing business with politically-exposed clients in the sanctions-hit country. Switzerland’s second-largest lender has cut assets it manages for the nation’s wealthy by more than half over the past few years, to about $2 billion, according to people familiar with the ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s commodities traders doubled their revenue haul in 2020 — another sign that Wall Street desks managed to print profits into the year’s finale, even as market mayhem subsided. Goldman’s business generated more than $2 billion in revenue for its best annual showing in about a decade, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group expects to post a fourth-quarter loss after setting aside $850 million for legal cases in US as CEO Thomas Gottstein seeks to tackle legacy issues and start the year with a clean slate. The amount is more than twice what the bank signaled last month when it flagged that a dispute with bond insurer MBIA Inc. ...