Banking

Bloomberg Greece’s government is forecasting 2.8% economic growth in 2020, which it says puts it on track to meet a budget target agreed with creditors while still enacting tax relief measures. The creditors, however, have warned that the cost of polices to which Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government has committed will create a shortfall of up to 900 million euros ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc’s proposed cryptocurrency has faced such overwhelming scorn since it was announced in June that an exchange is facilitating bets on whether the social-media company can come close to meeting its target launch date. CoinFLEX, a crypto-futures exchange that launched earlier this year, is offering derivatives that pay out based on the likelihood Libra will be operational by ...

Bloomberg IndusInd Bank, which saw a fifth of its market value wiped out over the past week on concern about its creditors, says the crisis of confidence engulfing India’s financial system is fading away. Outstanding loans to overstretched borrowers dipped at the Mumbai-based bank last quarter, lenders including IndusInd are working to resolve defaults at Dewan Housing Finance Ltd, and ...

Bloomberg Australia’s central bank joined the government in warning lenders not to be too strict when assessing borrowers, fearing such caution could dent an already slowing economy. “It is important that banks are not overly cautious in the implementation of current lending policies,” the Reserve Bank of Australia said in its Financial Stability Review. “Lending always entails a degree of ...

Bloomberg Between 2009 and 2015, Mihhail Murnikov spent his days handling as many transactions as he could at the non-resident unit of Danske Bank in Estonia. Roughly a year after Danske admitted that those transactions were part of a $220 billion money laundering scandal, prosecutors from Tallinn to Washington are still trying to get to the bottom of what really ...

Bloomberg Oswald Gruebel, who led both of Switzerland’s two biggest banks during his career, criticised negative interest rates and argued they’d lead to a further decline of the country’s financial sector. “Negative interest rates are crazy. That means money is not worth anything anymore,” Gruebel said in an interview with Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag. “As long as we have ...

Bloomberg Ashish Shah is caught in the middle of India’s latest financial crisis. As chief operating officer of Radius Developers, he’s struggling to fund construction of apartment complexes because of a liquidity crunch in the nation’s bloated shadow-banking sector. “Real estate is a sitting duck,” said Shah. “The timing is very crucial as the slowdown has hit the real estate ...

Bloomberg India’s central bank Governor Shaktikanta Das pledged further monetary policy easing if needed after reducing interest rates for a fifth time to boost a flailing economy. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) lowered its benchmark repurchase rate by 25 basis points to 5.15 percent, in line with the forecasts of a majority of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Echoing Mario ...

Bloomberg Yes Bank Ltd Chief Executive Officer Ravneet Gill said he expects to complete raising as much as $1.2 billion “much sooner than the market expects,” after sales of pledged shares eliminated an overhang on the lender’s stock. Gill reiterated in an interview his target of selling $1 billion to $1.2 billion of new shares to private equity investors, technology ...

Bloomberg The UK’s withdrawal from the European Union is complicating the bloc’s fight against money laundering in the financial system, according to EU authorities. Firms relocating from Britain could overwhelm the national bodies that supervise anti-money laundering systems, the three EU financial regulators said in a joint report. A no-deal Brexit would make things even more difficult by disrupting the ...