Banking

Bloomberg Wirecard AG fell the most since February in Frankfurt after a news report said it found repeated questionable accounting practices at the German payments firm. Wirecard fell as much as 23% in early trading after the Financial Times said it’s published internal company documents and correspondence that “appear to indicate a concerted effort to fraudulently inflate sales and profits” ...

Bloomberg Paytm is close to scoring $2 billion of new financing from investors including Jack Ma’s Ant Financial and SoftBank Group Corp, a person familiar with the matter said, describing a mega-deal that will raise the temperature in India’s increasingly heated financial payments arena. Rob Citrone’s Discovery Capital Management is also in discussions to join a funding round that values ...

Bloomberg Singapore’s central bank signaled it’s ready to adjust monetary policy further after easing on Monday for the first time since 2016 as risks to the economic growth outlook persist. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which uses the exchange rate as its main policy tool, reduced “slightly the rate of appreciation” of the currency band and said it’s prepared ...

Bloomberg A prolonged period of low interest rates risks making economic downturns more severe, according to Bank of England (BOE) deputy governor Jon Cunliffe. Speaking in London, Cunliffe said the drop in long-term market rates in developed economies partly reflected an over-pessimism about long-term prospects, and was also part of a structural trend. One “challenge of low for longer for ...

Bloomberg All around HDFC Bank Ltd, India’s biggest lender by market value, the news seems to be bad and getting worse: economic growth is slowing, loan losses are rising and shadow banks are mired in crisis. And yet investors keep piling into HDFC Bank’s stock, convinced it will emerge a winner from India’s financial woes. The company’s market value has ...

Bloomberg Kenya plans to borrow 422 billion shillings ($4.1 billion) from external lenders after lawmakers approved the government’s proposal to increase its debt limit. The government of the East African nation is negotiating or about to sign 44 loan agreements with 15 lenders including the African Development Bank, China, Japan and the World Bank, parliament documents show. The lawmakers approved ...

Bloomberg Considering the lack of enthusiasm for the so-called mini trade deal in China, the country’s disappointing trade data, an unexciting yuan fixing and the cautious-sounding analyst commentaries, it was a wonder that emerging markets were able to make any headway at all. But catch-up was predictably the order of the day following the US rally, so most currencies strengthened, ...

Bloomberg To see how little investors love China’s small banks, look no further than the nation’s largest online auction site. On Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s Taobao platform, a Chinese court tried to auction off 1.5 million shares of a rural bank in the eastern Zhejiang province for a starting price of $161,000 — about half their appraised value. After three ...

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve said it will begin buying $60 billion of Treasury bills per month to improve its control over the benchmark interest rate it uses to guide monetary policy after turmoil rocked money markets in September. The central bank, in a statement, stressed that “these actions are purely technical measures to support the effective implementation” of interest-rate policy ...

Bloomberg China’s central bank has clarified the definition of standard assets in the nation’s $14.1 trillion investment-product industry as it moves toward an enforcement deadline. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) published draft rules to define what qualifies as standard credit assets. These assets refer to fixed-income securities, including government bonds, central bank bills, corporate bonds, debt financing instruments of ...