Banking

Bloomberg The Bank of Thailand extended its 500 billion baht ($16 billion) “soft loan” program for small and medium-sized enterprises by six months to help with the effects of the lingering Covid-19 outbreak, the central bank said on its website. The central bank also relaxed rules to allow listed SMEs to join the low interest-rate lending program, which started April ...

Bloomberg HDFC Bank Ltd., India’s largest private lender, posted second-quarter profit that beat analysts’ expectations on strong loan growth and fall in bad loans. Net income was 75.1 billion rupees ($1.02 billion) for the three months to September, up from 63.4 billion rupees a year earlier, the lender said in a filing. The profits were 17% higher than the 64.1 ...

Bloomberg Westpac Banking Corp. is cutting more than 150 jobs as Australia’s second-largest lender consolidates its international operations, according to people familiar with the matter. The cuts will impact employees in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Jakarta where the Sydney-based bank is exiting its operations. Most staff are locally employed and the process will take one to two years, ...

Bloomberg Wall Street’s top matchmaker for megadeals sees a wave of corporate takeovers coming with a worrying implication for the workforce: a jump in job losses. “Politicians are going to be faced with the uncomfortable reality that you’re going to have more big business doing better and that there’s going to be more losses of jobs along the way,” Goldman ...

Bloomberg Ethiopia’s effort to stamp out counterfeiting by introducing new currency notes is pulling people who’ve never had a bank account into the financial system. Over the past four weeks, almost 1 million previously unbanked Ethiopians have handed in their two-decade-old banknotes, according to the central bank. In exchange, they were given a bank account from which they can draw ...

Bloomberg Singapore’s central bank signaled it would keep monetary policy unchanged for longer to complement a massive fiscal stimulus supporting the economy’s recovery. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, which uses the exchange rate as its main tool rather than a benchmark interest rate, kept its policy settings unchanged, in line with economists’ forecasts. The slope of the currency band was ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s homegrown investment bankers are rapidly losing their status as city’s go-to dealmakers, supplanted by mainland Chinese rivals who now hold a majority of senior jobs in Asia’s biggest financial hub. While the shift has long seemed inevitable given the expanding pool of mainland talent and dominant role of Chinese issuers in Hong Kong, the recent pace of ...

Bloomberg For some investors, Chinese bank shares in Hong Kong finally became cheap enough to buy. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (ICBC) surged as much as 7.2%, its best intraday gain in three years, after trading at the biggest discount to its Shanghai shares since early 2018. Its mainland shares only rise as much as 1.2%. ICBC’s Hong ...

Bloomberg The Danish government’s plan to fund early retirement for some workers by introducing an extra tax on the financial industry has gained enough support among opposition parties to be turned into law next year. After negotiations into the early hours of Saturday, the Danish Social Democrat-led government announced that it had reached an agreement with opposition parties to support ...

Bloomberg The European Commission is considering setting up a network of bad banks amid growing worries over non-performing loans during the coronavirus crisis, according to German newspaper Boersen-Zeitung. The network would bring economies of scale by directly opening the affected institutions and their assets to multiple jurisdictions, according to the report. It cites a presentation by the Directorate-General Fisma, which ...