Banking

Bloomberg The pound reached the highest level in almost seven months as traders stepped up bets on a win for the Conservatives in next week’s election. The currency pushed above $1.30 as polls show the ruling Tories holding their lead over Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing Labour Party. Sterling also advanced against all major peers as US president Donald Trump’s visit to ...

Bloomberg After five years of negative rates imposed by the European Central Bank (ECB), German lenders are breaking the last taboo: Charging retail clients for their savings starting with very first euro in the their accounts. While many banks have been passing on negative rates to retail clients for some time, they have typically only done so for deposits of ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Thailand said it has many tools left to manage capital inflows to curb the local currency’s strength, which is hurting growth prospects in the Southeast Asian economy. The scope and speed of the baht’s appreciation is out of line with economic fundamentals such as the current-account surplus, Don Nakornthab, a senior director in the central bank’s ...

Bloomberg The World Bank sees Tanzania’s economic growth accelerating to 5.6% this year from an estimated 5.4% in 2018, driven by a recovery in exports and growing tourist arrivals. The rate of expansion will also quicken to 5.8% in 2020 and 6.1% in the following year, it said in a report published on Tuesday. “Tanzania was again one of the ...

Bloomberg UniCredit SpA’s plan to eliminate 8,000 jobs is pushing cuts announced by banks this year past 73,000, almost all of them in Europe, where negative interest rates and a slowing economy force lenders to slash costs. Chief Executive Officer Jean Pierre Mustier announced the measures as part of the next, four-year chapter in his overhaul of Italy’s largest bank. ...

Bloomberg HDFC Bank Ltd, India’s most valuable lender by market capitalisation, sees tentative signs of a revival in rural areas at a time when the wider economy is sputtering. “The recent loan outreach programmes underway in rural areas have given us the sense that the consumption in rural and semi-urban areas is turning more positive,” HDFC Bank Executive Director Kaizad ...

Bloomberg Financial regulators are pushing for legal changes in order to avoid the Philippines being placed on a global monitoring list for countries with weak anti-money laundering and terrorism financing controls. The government needs to implement the changes by October or risk being placed on a “grey” list by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, the Philippines Anti-Money Laundering Council ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve governor Lael Brainard painted a mostly positive picture of the near-term outlook for the US economy while advocating longer-term changes in the conduct of monetary policy in an era of low interest rates and subdued inflation. “There are good reasons to expect the economy to grow at a pace modestly above potential over the next year or ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG sold another chunk of unwanted assets to Goldman Sachs Group Inc as part of a radical restructuring that’s seeing the German firm exit businesses where it’s been unable to compete. The nation’s largest lender recently sold securities with a notional value of about 40 billion pounds ($51 billion) to the US bank, people briefed on the ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc was fined 44 million pounds ($57 million) by the Bank of England (BOE) for years of inaccurate reporting to regulators about the lender’s capital and liquidity levels. Applying its largest fine ever, the central bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) said that between June 2014 and December 2018, three UK units of the Wall Street bank had significant ...