Banking

Bloomberg Pakistan appointed International Monetary Fund economist Reza Baqir as its central bank governor amid sweeping changes across the nation’s key finance and economic posts as the government negotiates for a crucial bailout from the global fund. Baqir was appointed to run the State Bank of Pakistan for a three-year term shortly after former governor Tariq Bajwa and Federal Board ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who pledged early in his tenure to speak in “plain English” and improve the central bank’s public communications, is finding it tough to deliver a clear message. In the latest of several reversals, Powell dismissed the recent deceleration in prices as likely “transitory,” six weeks after he described low inflation as “one of the ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s banks should be forced to invest in new coal mines in the country, the ruling African National Congress’s head of economic transformation said. Nedbank Group Ltd. and Standard Bank Group Ltd. have said “they are not going to put money in coal any more,” Enoch Godongwana said in an interview on Ca- rte Blanche, a Johannesburg-based investigative ...

Bloomberg First-quarter gold purchases by central banks, led by Russia and China, were the highest in six years as countries diversify their assets away from the US dollar. Global gold reserves rose 145.5 tonnes in the first quarter, a 68 percent increase from a year earlier, the World Gold Council said in a report. Russia remains the largest buyer as ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer John Flint is pressing ahead with a plan to rein in costs after the Asia-focussed lender reported its best quarter in more than three years. The better-than-expected first quarter results were driven by revenue growth that increased at triple the pace of adjusted operating expenses, reversing a pattern that bedeviled Flint in 2018. ...

Bloomberg BNP Paribas SA reported the biggest fixed-income trading jump of all US and European banks in the first quarter, marking a rebound after recent losses and downgraded targets. Debt trading revenue unexpectedly rose 29 percent from the previous year, helped by growth in rates and foreign-exchange transactions, the French bank said. That helped BNP’s global markets unit — its ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong borrowing costs are expected to remain stubbornly high over the rest of the quarter, supporting the local currency. That’s according to Carie Li, an economist at OCBC Wing Hang Bank Ltd., who says the city’s shrinking cash pool is making banks more reluctant to lend. The one-month interbank rate, known as Hibor, has climbed to 2.07 percent, ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs has put off the German launch of its consumer bank — Marcus until next year because of the delay in Brexit proceedings as well as cost constraints, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing two people familiar with the situation. Had Brexit taken place on March 29 as it was planned earlier, Goldman Sachs would have “wanted ...

Bloomberg Two Federal Reserve officials laid out the case for a possible interest-rate cut just days after Chairman Jerome Powell said there was no reason to move in either direction. Two other US central bankers sounded more comfortable with the current policy stance. St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard and Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, both policy voters ...

Bloomberg Pakistan’s government removed the governor of the central bank and the head of the tax authority amid the nation’s bailout negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. Tariq Bajwa, chief of the State Bank of Pakistan, and Federal Board of Revenue Chairman Mohammad Jehanzeb Khan were fired because of their “performance,” Firdous Ashiq Awan, a special assistant to Prime Minister ...