Banking

Bloomberg Hedge funds betting on Chinese equities surged last year, standouts in an industry that struggled to outsmart the longest-running bull market in history. A number of funds focused on mainland stocks posted double-digit returns in 2019, according to people familiar with the matter and investor letters seen by Bloomberg. Star performers included Greenwoods Asset Management’s $2.2 billion Golden China ...

Bloomberg India’s beleaguered developers see a glimmer of hope after the nation’s biggest bank announced a programme that could unclog choked funding lines to the property market. State Bank of India (SBI) said it will finance both builders and homebuyers, charging developers a premium and offering the latter a refund if their apartments are left unfinished. While Sunteck Realty Ltd ...

Bloomberg The first of Hong Kong’s new generation of digital banks has announced its arrival with a 6% introductory rate for deposits. ZA Bank Ltd, one of eight firms preparing to start digital-only banks in Hong Kong, has begun a trial run that pays a select group of depositors over 3 percentage points more than banks such as HSBC Holdings ...

Bloomberg At Danske Bank A/S, the cost of adapting to a world intensely focused on financial crime just keeps growing. In an interview in Stockholm, the chief executive of Danske in Sweden, Johanna Norberg, said “the peak” level of investment to meet anti-money laundering requirements has “not yet been reached.” The 48-year-old has been running Danske’s operations in the biggest ...

Bloomberg Expectations of global growth and particularly in emerging markets mean this year is likely to be positive for commodities but with a number of wild cards, according to Citigroup Inc. The US and China, which hold outsized sway over the world’s economic fortunes, both may have policies that skew towards higher global growth, strategists led by global head of ...

Bloomberg Should banks be forced to accept a client who could be on the wrong side of the law? A court in Finland is about to decide the answer to that question, and its verdict may have far-reaching implications. Russian billionaire Boris Rotenberg is suing four Nordic banks for not doing business with him. The oligarch, an associate of President ...

Bloomberg Bank of England (BOE) policy makers considering whether the UK needs further stimulus will get a deluge of data in the coming week. The economy is back under the microscope after outgoing Governor Mark Carney last week said officials are debating the merits of action and have plenty of room to act if necessary. A day later, Silvana Tenreyro ...

Bloomberg China’s fiscal stimulus is shifting back to a focus on infrastructure investment, away from the approach of cutting taxes for businesses the government favored in previous years, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. “We expect no major further tax cuts in 2020, though the effect of tax cuts will linger into this year,” JPMorgan economists including Zhu ...

Bloomberg Jerome Powell was an early adopter of the view that US unemployment could fall further than thought, but back then didn’t parlay that insight into a more dovish stance on interest rates. Transcripts of Fed meetings in 2014 showed then-governor and now-Chairman Powell was already among the most optimistic Fed officials about how many Americans could be drawn back ...

Bloomberg Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce hired former Conservative Party lawmaker Lisa Raitt as a vice-chair for global investment banking. Raitt joins CIBC on January 27 and will focus on developing and fostering senior-level client relationships and business development globally for CIBC’s capital markets division, the Toronto-based bank said in a statement. She’ll be based in Toronto. “Lisa’s experience leading ...