Banking

Bloomberg UBS Group AG is beefing up the ranks of senior executives at its securities joint venture in China after taking majority control late last year, hiring five managing directors for the investment banking business, said a person with knowledge of the matter. Shen Dehua, most recently investment banking head of HSBC Holdings Plc’s Qianhai securities venture, joined UBS Securities ...

Bloomberg Australian central bank chief Philip Lowe kept his head below the parapet by keeping interest rates unchanged less than two weeks out from an election, saying lower unemployment is needed to drive faster inflation. Lowe left the cash rate at 1.5 percent — where it has stood since he took the helm in September 2016 — after economists and ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank’s (ECB) outgoing chief economist has some parting words for his colleagues on the Governing Council: be careful when planning your future strategy. Peter Praet, whose term ends this month, dived into the debate over whether the ECB needs to revisit its interpretation of price stability, which it sees as keeping inflation just under 2 percent. ...

Bloomberg China’s banking regulator has told the nation’s major lenders to accelerate recognition of nonperforming loans, as officials seek to bolster the quality of lending, according to people familiar with the matter. The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission in recent weeks used so-called window guidance to inform banks with nationwide operations that they must classify corporate loans overdue for ...

Bloomberg For the first time since Philip Lowe took the helm of Australia’s central bank in September 2016 there’s a real chance he may cut interest rates, making him the first in the developed world to do so this cycle. Economists and markets are both split on whether the Reserve Bank will cut at Tuesday’s meeting, with the highest odds ...

Bloomberg Troubles among India’s non-bank financiers will persist for at least a year even if the danger of a full-blown financial crisis has passed, according to the head of the nation’s most valuable bank. Tighter regulatory oversight and asset sales have staved off the worst of the problems afflicting India’s non-bank financial firms following last year’s defaults by Infrastructure Leasing ...

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 ...