Banking

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. is exploring the sale of its asset-management unit as the biggest banks choose paths of diving deeper into the business or getting out. The Wells Fargo unit could fetch more than $3 billion, according to a person briefed on the matter, who said the bank began discussing a possible deal with other asset managers and ...

Bloomberg Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jes Staley’s drive to make investment banking the centerpiece of his strategy paid off in the third quarter, with equities trading in a volatile market beating the bank’s Wall Street peers. The shares approached a two-month high. The London-based bank’s equity trading income jumped 40% and foreign-exchange, rates and credit trading rises 23%, ...

Bloomberg The Riksbank governor, Stefan Ingves, fears the economic outlook is deteriorating amid signs the coronavirus pandemic is tightening its grip across Europe, and ensnaring Sweden again too. “If you look at our forecasts, it will take a few years before GDP is back” at pre-crisis levels, Ingves said in an interview in Stockholm. “And those forecasts were done before ...

Bloomberg There’s so much cash in Europe there are just not enough bonds to go around. The amount of spare liquidity in the euro-area economy hit an all-time high of 3.2 trillion euros ($3.8 trillion) this month and plenty of that is chasing any new debt issue. This was seen in the record 233 billion euros of orders for the ...

Bloomberg Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. is ruling out further job cuts at its brokerage business in Asia after a lengthy overhaul, even as global banks trim headcount during the pandemic. “We are done with it — it’s over,” Saburo Araki, chief executive officer of Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Holdings Co., said in an interview. “It must have been painful for ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is likely to consider changing its inflation forecasts to reflect the short-term impact on prices of a government travel campaign at its policy meeting next week, according to people familiar with the matter. The central bank will probably discuss cutting its price projection for the year ending in March to account for the downward ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG posted better-than-expected third-quarter profit and set aside $1.5 billion for share buybacks next year as Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti prepares to hand over to Ralph Hamers. The Zurich-based wealth manager — the world’s largest — followed US banks in reporting earnings that benefited from increased market volatility and higher transaction-based income. It also unexpectedly saw ...

Bloomberg Bank of Thailand’s new governor said he’s looking into new measures to boost the economy as it faces a long and uneven road to recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. The policy response to the economic crisis should be long term, factoring in challenges likely to arise over the next two years, Governor Sethaput Suthiwart-Narueput told reporters at his first ...

Bloomberg Australia’s central bank (RBA) said further policy easing is likely to “gain more traction” as restrictions are lifted across the economy and agreed the governor would flag the shift to targeting actual over forecast inflation. “As the economy opens up, members considered it reasonable to expect that further monetary easing would gain more traction than had been the case ...

Bloomberg Environmental activists and economists claim there’s a way for the European Central Bank (ECB) to account for climate risks in its stimulus programs without the time-consuming preparatory work officials often say is needed. Just last week, ECB President Christine Lagarde said her institution must question whether “market neutrality” is appropriate in light of environmental risks. As far as researchers ...