Banking

Bloomberg China’s central bank pledged more financial support for small and micro businesses while saying it plans to stick to a prudent monetary policy stance this year. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) will improve the incentive mechanism for lending to such companies, it said in a statement following a two-day work conference in Beijing. Authorities will make it easier ...

Bloomberg There’s no end of theories on all the ways in which negative interest rates are hurting economies. But in Denmark, where the policy has existed longer than anywhere else, one fear seems to have been put to rest. The central bank in Copenhagen, which uses negative rates to keep the krone pegged to the euro, says its research shows ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve officials downplayed concerns about the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the US economy amid flaring tensions with Iran, even as a record of the central bank’s meeting last month showed that downside risks remain on their minds. “That’s one of the great things about the US economy, is it does have this resiliency to it,” Cleveland Fed ...

Bloomberg China should consider letting commercial banks foray into securities business, according to Bank of Communications Co Chief Economist Lian Ping. Lenders should be enabled to establish new securities firms or be allowed to acquire or merge with brokers, the official Shanghai Securities News reported, citing Lian’s speech at a forum in the city on Saturday. The capital of commercial ...

Bloomberg Danske Bank A/S probably will be fined around 13.5 billion kroner ($2 billion) this year by authorities in Denmark, the US and the UK as investigations into Europe’s biggest money laundering scandal draw to a close, according to estimates by Jyske Bank. Danske has admitted that a large part of 200 billion euros ($223 billion) in transactions at an ...

Bloomberg Venezuela’s international reserves fell $832 million between December 30 and January 2, reaching a thirty-year low of $6.63 billion on January 2. The country began the week with reserves of $7.47 billion on December 30, according to central bank data. The level of $6.63 billion is the lowest since July 1989, when reserves were at $6.68 billion. “The fall ...

Bloomberg Christine Lagarde has a plan for rebutting German criticism of the bond-buying programme she inherited as European Central Bank (ECB) president: Put a German in charge of it. Lagarde has handed one of the ECB’s highest-profile roles to a German who has taken a stand against undue sniping at the institution’s policies. Isabel Schnabel, a University of Bonn economics ...

Bloomberg China’s financial regulator said it will implement a series of measures to shore up the nation’s troubled smaller banks and insurers while continuing a clampdown on shadow financing and property speculation. The regulator will introduce measures to eliminate bad loans and promote mergers, capital injections and the restructuring of high risk institutions, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission ...

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve may have succeeded in thwarting major year-end turmoil in funding markets, but 2020 is likely to bring a whole new set of concerns. The US central bank has been injecting liquidity into markets through repurchase-agreement operations since mid-September in a bid to keep control of short-end rates. Earlier this month the Fed ramped up its offerings ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde’s promise to learn German has prompted some suggestions on what her first important word should be — including from a German colleague. In response to an informal Twitter poll, incoming Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel suggested Lagarde should start with “Vertrauen,” or “trust.” Schnabel didn’t elaborate on her word choice in the ...