Banking

Bloomberg The pound tumbled to a one-month low after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told German Chancellor Angela Merkel a Brexit deal is impossible under terms the EU demands. Dimming prospects of an accord between Britain and the EU sent sterling sliding against all of its major peers. Further souring the mood, European Council President Donald Tusk accused Johnson of ...

Bloomberg Yoshitaka Kitao wants to build a financial empire in an area shunned by investors: the downtrodden ranks of Japan’s regional banks. The chief executive officer of SBI Holdings Inc says he has close to $1 billion to plow into any of the 104 local lenders scattered across Japan, which were described recently by one analyst as an “accident waiting ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc may eliminate as many as 10,000 jobs as part of a cost-cutting drive, according to a Financial Times report that signalled Europe may bear the brunt of the initiative. The plan would result in a substantial reduction in HSBC’s workforce of about 238,000, the FT said, citing two people briefed on the matter. The bank, one ...

Bloomberg Euro-area stocks would stand to gain more from a Brexit deal by the end of this month than UK shares, JPMorgan Cazenove strategists said. While such a scenario would be bullish for domestic British companies, a strengthening of the pound would take away much of the upside for UK equities, strategists led by Mislav Matejka wrote in a note. ...

Bloomberg A growing number of German banks are passing on negative interest rates to their retail customers as the costs become too high to bear on their own. Berliner Volksbank, the country’s second-largest cooperative lender, started to apply a minus 0.5% rate on deposits exceeding 100,000 euros ($110,000) in its first charge for retail clients. The move may encourage other ...

Bloomberg It’s too early to bid farewell to the decade-long equity bull market as stocks are still providing healthy returns for investors, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “Even with low profit growth the corporate sector has a high free-cash-flow yield and the dividend yield (plus buybacks) ought to still provide a reasonable relative return,” Peter Oppenheimer, Goldman’s chief global ...

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 ...