Banking

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc’s transactions with Iran were worth tens of billions of dollars more than previously known, a whistleblower said in a lawsuit claiming the British bank actively pursued Iranian business in violation of US sanctions. The whistleblower, a bank executive who has not been named in court papers, was the bank’s global head of transaction banking and foreign ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President Eric Rosengren said he doesn’t believe the US economy needs an interest-rate cut, given the positive data that’s rolled in since mid-June. “The economy’s doing actually quite well,” Rosengren said in an interview with CNBC. “We’re not really having an economic slowdown.” Rosengren, who votes this year on the policy-making Federal Open Market ...

Bloomberg Ross McEwan, who engineered Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s revival, is now taking on another turnaround job after being appointed chief executive officer of scandal-plagued National Australia Bank (NAB). During his time at RBS, which was nationalised in the wake of the global financial crisis and beset by a multitude of scandals, the bank returned to profit and ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG has hired investment banker Jerry Wiant from Lazard Ltd, where he had a two-year stint as a managing director focused on banking institutions. Wiant will join Credit Suisse’s global financial institutions later this summer as a managing director and head of Americas banks, according to an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg. He joined Lazard in ...

Bloomberg Ghana has pumped 800 million cedis ($150 million) into a special purpose vehicle created to bail out banks that don’t have enough capital, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT) will be getting the funds from the finance ministry after dropping a plan to raise the money through a bond sale, said the ...

Bloomberg A key Canadian interest rate used by lenders to determine who can qualify for a mortgage has dropped for the first time in almost three years, potentially giving the country’s housing market a near-term boost. The Bank of Canada lowered its 5-year conventional mortgage rate to 5.19 percent, from 5.34 percent, where it had been since May 2018. It’s ...

Bloomberg The next member of the European Central Bank’s Governing Council from Latvia will be selected through an open competition if Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins gets his way. The premier is looking for a clean break for the monetary authority, which was tainted by a bribery scandal during the current governor’s 18 years at the helm, he said. Karins ...

Bloomberg Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan has indicated the political challenges posed by Brexit were the reasons he didn’t apply to head up the Bank of England. In an interview with the BBC, Rajan confirmed he hadn’t sought the position and cited the fact that central banking “has become much more political in recent times” as an ...

Bloomberg Australia’s banking regulator is set for a major overhaul after a government-commissioned review found it had a “culture of conformity” and needed to become more forceful. In a scathing 146-page report released on Wednesday, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) was found to be slow to act, tentative in addressing issues that don’t entail traditional financial risks, and have ...

Bloomberg Svenska Handelsbanken AB, one of Sweden’s biggest banks, is taking a long, hard look at its business model to see which corners it can ax so that costs stop growing faster than income. Carina Akerstrom, who took over as chief executive officer in March, said she’s “not at all” happy with the way in which Handelsbanken’s costs are developing. ...