Banking

Bloomberg Ghana stocks headed for the lowest in 21 months as investors sold shares to free up cash as they contend with the fallout from banking reforms in the West African nation. The Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index retreated 1.5 percent in Accra on Wednesday, heading for the lowest close since October 2017. Ghana’s banking industry regulator completed a clean-up ...

Bloomberg Swedbank AB acknowledged it will no longer be able to live up to its goal of paying out one of the highest dividend ratios in the Nordic finance industry. Sweden’s oldest bank, which is dealing with the fallout of a money laundering scandal that has left it Europe’s worst performing financial stock this year, said it will now target ...

Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co was hit by the Federal Reserve’s about-face on interest rates in the second quarter, warning that lending income will fall in the second half. The largest US bank cut its full-year outlook for net interest income — revenue from customers’ loan payments minus what the bank pays depositors — by $500 million. NII accounted for ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc won’t launch Libra, the controversial cryptocurrency it’s planning to build with dozens of partner firms, until regulators’ concerns are fully addressed, according to the company’s top executive on the project. David Marcus, who will appear before members of both houses of US Congress to discuss the project this week, said Facebook will also get ‘appropriate approvals’ before ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co is already feeling the sting of falling rates. Net interest income (NII), the difference between what the bank charges borrowers and what it pays depositors, fell to the lowest since 2016. That brought the net interest margin to a lower-than-expected 2.82 percent. Declining interest rates and a potential Federal Reserve cut have fuelled concern across ...

Bloomberg Charles Schwab Corp appears to be making a play to grab more advisory clients as fees fall for asset management and trading. The San Francisco-based brokerage firm is in talks to buy USAA’s brokerage and wealth-management operations for roughly $2 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. The deal may be reached this month, the newspaper said, citing people familiar ...

Bloomberg The European Union is unlikely to withdraw the UK stock market’s equivalence status as a Brexit “negotiating tool” after withdrawing market recognition from Switzerland earlier this month, according to Lombard Odier. The UK’s equity market is almost twice the size of Switzerland’s and London’s clearing houses, which guarantee contracts even if one side proves insolvent, are a “core part” ...

Bloomberg Europe’s bond investors are starting to ask whether the European Central Bank (ECB) will pair a potential interest rate cut with unprecedented purchases of senior bank debt. Policy makers have previously shied away from buying unsecured bank bonds, not least because of possible conflicts of interest stemming from the ECB’s role in regulating banks it would be purchasing notes ...

Bloomberg Central bankers readying to fight another economic downturn are tossing hand grenades rather than firing bazookas. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi stand ready alongside many of their counterparts to cut interest rates to bolster the weakest growth in a decade and lackluster inflation. Yet they have little to work with and, perhaps ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG is predicting a big decline in India’s sovereign bond yields to levels last seen in 2009. The yield curve is pricing in a deeper trough on policy, with expectations of more rate cuts from the Reserve Bank of India and a change in the way the authority manages liquidity to help transmit lower borrowing costs through ...