Banking

Bloomberg The biggest banks in the UK are among the worst offenders in paying women less than men and face being summoned to explain themselves, according to Nicky Morgan, the Conservative member of Parliament who will chair hearings this summer into the finance industry’s alarming gender pay gap. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, Barclays Bank Plc and others ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are among five banks that agreed to pay European Union fines totalling 1.07 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for colluding on foreign-exchange trading strategies. Citigroup was hit hardest with a 310.8 million-euro penalty, followed by fines of 249.2 million euros and 228.8 million euros for RBS and ...

Bloomberg Negative interest rates are not the main culprit for European banks’ feeble profitability, European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said, signalling the institution is in no rush to bring relief. Sub-zero rates are costing euro zone banks roughly 8 billion euros ($9 billion) annually, which is “really peanuts” in this landscape, Coeure told lawmakers at a French ...

Bloomberg Sweden’s biggest lender, Svenska Handelsbanken AB, is pulling out of the Baltic region arguing that the cost of staying is simply too big. Handelsbanken’s Baltic operations are far smaller than those of its Swedish peers, Swedbank AB and SEB AB. But the decision comes at a sensitive time. Estonia is at the center of a $230 billion money laundering ...

Bloomberg The Philippine central bank will consider reducing the reserve requirement ratio for lenders further if banks don’t misbehave and speculate against the peso, Governor Benjamin Diokno said. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas will “closely look at how banks will use funds freed up by RRR cut,” Diokno told a forum in Ma-nila, a day after announcing a 2 percentage-point reduction ...

Bloomberg Indonesia’s central bank left its benchmark interest rate unchanged as the currency comes under renewed pressure from an escalation in trade tensions between the US and China. The seven-day reverse repurchase rate was left at 6%, as predicted by all but one of 30 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Governor Perry Warjiyo and his board raised the rate by a ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump called on the Federal Reserve to “match” what he said China would do to offset economic hardship being caused by tariffs as he sought to draft the US central bank into his simmering trade war. “China will be pumping money into their system and probably reducing interest rates, as always, in order to make up for ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve officials are sticking with their pledge for patience on interest rates, shrugging off President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war and his pressure for a cut. New York Fed President John Williams and his Kansas City colleague Esther George, who vote on policy this year, acknowledged that new tariffs on Chinese imports could affect the outlook for US ...

Bloomberg ING Groep NV and UniCredit SpA are lining up advisers to explore a potential takeover of Commerzbank AG after the German lender’s talks with Deutsche Bank AG broke down last month, according to people familiar with the matter. The Dutch bank is working informally with boutique investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners, while the Italian lender is working with JPMorgan ...

Bloomberg The finance minister of Sweden wants her country’s central bank to take more factors into account than just inflation, when setting monetary policy. In Stockholm, Magdalena Andersson spoke in favour of having more explicit growth and employment targets for the Riksbank. They should be “clearer” goals in monetary policy, she said. Sweden’s central bank has been targeting inflation since ...