Banking

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. ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG agreed to pay more than $130 million to settle criminal and civil charges that it bribed foreign officials and manipulated the market for precious-metals futures through a trading tactic known as spoofing. The Frankfurt-based bank agreed to a deal in which it won’t be prosecuted as long as it doesn’t engage in the practices again for ...

Bloomberg Commerzbank AG will take an additional 2.1 billion-euro ($2.6 billion) hit in the fourth quarter as the pandemic weighs on interest rates and drives up bad loans, pushing the lender deeper into the red as it readies a new turnaround plan. Commerzbank will write off 1.5 billion euros in goodwill on its books and set aside about 630 million ...

Bloomberg After three years of savings, top US banks could face an increased tax bill of as much as $11 billion a year if President-elect Joe Biden moves forward with corporate rate hikes he campaigned on. That would follow $42 billion of savings by the six biggest banks thanks to outgoing President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which have boosted ...

Bloomberg China sentenced Hu Huaibang, a former chairman of the nation’s biggest policy bank, to life imprisonment on charges of corruption, the second harsh punishment doled out this week in a sign President Xi Jinping is escalating a campaign to crack down on lawbreaking state officials. Hu was found guilty of taking bribes totaling 85.5 million yuan ($13 million) during ...