Banking

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell likened the potential fallout surrounding the central bank’s interest-rate forecasts to a nuclear meltdown in what even he admitted was a stretched metaphor back in 2014. “The market doesn’t really understand how the SEP works and how it gets put together,” the then-Fed governor said in March 2014, referring to the central bank’s quarterly ...

Bloomberg South Korea’s biggest arranger of offshore bond sales expects another busy year in 2020 due to a big wall of maturing debt and foreign investor demand at a time of rising uncertainties elsewhere. Korean issuers sold $33.3 billion of notes abroad last year, only slightly below the six-year high marked in 2018, Bloomberg-compiled data show. Issuance in 2020 will ...

Bloomberg Outgoing Bank of England (BOE) governor Mark Carney said central banks globally are getting close to running out of tools should they need to tackle another serious economic downturn. “It’s generally true that there’s much less ammunition for all the major central banks than they previously had, and I’m of the opinion that this situation will persist for some ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG appointed managing director Jonathon Kaufman as the head of its new global infrastructure, utility and renewables group. “Infrastructure was the fastest-growing asset class in 2019, raising over $90 billion, and continues to be of strategic importance,” investment-banking chief David Miller, and Malcolm Price, who oversees the new group as well as financial sponsors and leveraged ...

Bloomberg Tencent Holdings Ltd and China UnionPay Co will soon unify the mobile codes that consumers scan to pay for purchases, granting the Chinese central bank-backed network a bigger foothold in a $27 trillion payments arena. Tencent and UnionPay have agreed to integrate their QR code systems, allowing their respective customers to transfer or spend money using the same smartphone ...

Bloomberg A group of Barclays Plc shareholders have filed what they say is the first climate change resolution at a European bank, taking aim at the lender’s support of fossil fuels. Eleven institutional investors and more than 100 individuals urged Barclays to say how it will phase out financing energy firms that don’t align with the Paris Agreement climate goals, ...

Bloomberg Thailand’s trade surplus with the US exceeded $20 billion, raising the chances it will be added to the US Treasury’s watchlist of currency manipulators. The surplus reached $20.05 billion in the 12 months through November, according to US Census Bureau data released in Washington. That exceeds the $20 billion limit the US Treasury has set for bilateral goods trade ...

Bloomberg Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves signalled that the bank’s decision to raise its main rate to zero last month won’t be followed by more tightening for a very long time. According to minutes of the bank’s December meeting, Ingves said he’s even willing to let inflation exceed the bank’s target for a while. That said, he also defended the decision ...

Bloomberg The risk of a US-Iran conflict is bringing fresh focus to the question of what Jerome Powell meant when he said it will take a “material” change in the outlook for the Federal Reserve to raise or lower interest rates. The answer so far — as investors wait to see how Tehran responds to the US killing of its ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG expects to cut as many as 500 private banking jobs as the lender moves forward with a wealth management overhaul aimed at strengthening regional units and speeding up decision making. As part of the revamp, UBS will split up the private banking business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, giving Caroline Kuhnert responsibility for central ...