Banking

Bloomberg Sweden’s government wants to revisit the idea of imposing a tax on the financial industry. Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson says her goal is to have a levy that singles out banks with far more precision than previous proposals. “It should include only the financial sector,” she said in an interview in Stockholm. “We want one that has a more ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has picked a little-known technology firm to help handle payments for its planned credit-card partnership with Apple Inc. The bank struck a deal last year to license payments-processing software from CoreCard Software, owned by Intelligent Systems Corp., to help with its foray into the consumer-card business, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, ...

Bloomberg The new chief of Kazakhstan’s central bank dodged a debt claim in 2014 thanks to a legal system that’s failed to protect lenders from rampant defaults and repeated crises. In 2014, Yerbolat Dossayev and three business partners were given a reprieve on repaying 1.9 billion tenge, then worth $13 million, that they’d personally guaranteed to the central Asian country’s ...

Bloomberg An increasing number of economists see additional stimulus as the Bank of Japan’s next policy step, while they are unanimous in forecasting no change at this week’s board meeting. Some 37 percent of 46 economists surveyed by Bloomberg this month forecast the next policy change will be additional easing, a jump from 18 percent in January. All of them ...

Bloomberg Indian lenders haven’t fully passed on the central bank’s latest interest rate cut to borrowers, pressuring the monetary authority to loosen policy even more to support economic growth. A mismatch between deposits and credit growth, and competition from the government for small-savings mean banks face a high cost of capital, limiting their ability to transmit monetary policy easing. Bankers ...

Bloomberg ING Groep NV reduced its bonus pool by 25 percent after a year marred by a record money-laundering settlement and public discontent in the Netherlands over banker pay. The country’s largest lender paid out 303 million euros ($340 million) in bonuses for 2018, down from 403 million euros the year before, according to its latest annual report. ING said ...

Bloomberg Mario Draghi’s latest and potentially last salvo to boost the euro-area economy risks not being enough. The European Central Bank president, who will leave office in October after spending his entire eight-year tenure crisis-fighting, announced a new round of long-term loans to banks and promised interest rates won’t be lifted from record lows until 2020. The fresh effort to ...

Bloomberg Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. (MUFG) has been on an expansion kick in the debt market. But its first attempt as a sole underwriter on a dollar high-yield bond sale didn’t go so well. The bank’s securities unit bought $500 million of bonds directly from oil and gas exploration firm CNX Resources Corp., with plans to parcel them off ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is cutting 10 staff in its commodities division as the bank reviews the footprint of the once-dominant unit, according to a person familiar with the matter. It is cutting seven trading jobs and three sales jobs in Singapore, London and Houston, representing about 5 percent of the unit’s staff, the person said, asking not to ...

Bloomberg The policy shift under way at the Federal Reserve will affect new forecasts to be published later this month and also their longer-run strategy. Recent remarks by Chairman Jerome Powell, Vice Chairman Richard Clarida, Governor Lael Brainard and New York Fed President John Williams have all signalled their contentment with letting the policy rate rest at 2.25 percent to ...