Banking

Bloomberg Brazil’s central bank announced it will sell dollars in the spot market for the first time this year, boosting its efforts to support the currency after a dire week. Policy makers will offer as much as $1 billion in a spot dollar auction. The central bank had been stepping into the foreign exchange markets only via swap auctions, of ...

Bloomberg Pressure is building for interest-rate cuts that could push emerging economies into a quagmire of runaway inflation and currency weakness. That’s because average real yields in emerging markets may have already turned negative, if first-quarter inflation projections are any indication. Even bigger economies such as India, Taiwan and Turkey offer bond returns below price growth, leaving little room for ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India (SBI) said it will immediately invest 24.5 billion rupees ($332 million) in Yes Bank Ltd. as part of a central bank-backed rescue plan for the embattled lender. SBI, the country’s largest bank, won’t ask the federal government for capital to fund the rescue and may instead work with other investors, Chairman Rajnish Kumar told reporters ...

Bloomberg Global central banks have no room to fight the crisis caused by the coronavirus outbreak, according to Deutsche Bank AG. “Policy failure is here,” George Saravelos, bank’s global head of currency research, wrote in a note. “We disagree with central bank pronouncements that there is room to fight the crisis.” Market turmoil around the world deepened, as growing fears ...

Bloomberg Argentina’s latest debt dilemma is whether to pay or delay its local peso debt. While the country’s billions of dollars in foreign debt with private creditors and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been the primary focus for investors, the nation now faces a hurdle that’s just as large: the almost 1.8 trillion pesos ($29 billion) in local debt ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Robert Kaplan said the pace of acceleration in the coronavirus across the US will be an important factor as he weighs the need for another interest rate cut when policy makers meet later this month. “I am going to be watching very, very carefully the path of diagnosed cases,” Kaplan said in a ...

Bloomberg Mastercard Inc. closed its office in Sao Paulo and an annex location near its headquarters in New York after an employee contracted coronavirus. The Brazil-based employee traveled to the annex office in Purchase, New York, earlier this week, the company said in a statement. The two locations are undergoing a “thorough sanitisation process,” it said. “While it is believed ...

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates by half a percentage point in the first such emergency move since the 2008 financial crisis, amid mounting concern that the coronavirus outbreak threatens to stall the record US economic expansion. The rate cut, which came between the central bank’s regularly scheduled meetings, was announced hours after Group of Seven finance chiefs held ...

Bloomberg European Union (EU) officials are weighing a new crackdown on bank bailouts after national governments exploited loopholes in rules passed in the wake of the financial crisis. One focus of the discussions is the so-called “precautionary recapitalisation” rule that Italy used to inject 5.4 billion euros ($6 billion) into Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA in 2017, according ...

Bloomberg Brazil’s central bank opened the door to more interest rate cuts as it signalled that the outbreak of the new coronavirus creates a bigger risk of an economic slowdown than of a spike in inflation. Policy makers said that they’re closely monitoring the effects of the epidemic on financial markets and on the wider economy. Its impact on Brazil’s ...