Banking

Bloomberg The Bank of England stepped up its defenses against a disruptive Brexit, offering lenders extra liquidity provisions over the period covering the UK’s withdrawal. The BOE will hold Indexed Long-Term Repo operations on a weekly instead of monthly basis between March 12 and the end of April — the time surrounding the planned exit date. The approach, designed to ...

Bloomberg The doyen of Australian interest-rate forecasters has shifted ground and now predicts the Reserve Bank will cut twice to counter slower growth and higher unemployment. Bill Evans’s announcement that he expects the RBA to reduce the cash rate by a quarter-percentage point in August and November came less than an hour after employment data showed strong hiring in January. ...

Bloomberg Two Federal Reserve officials highlighted the benefits of an approach to monetary policy called average inflation targeting, which would entail accepting overshoots of the central bank’s 2 percent price goal to make up for times when inflation was too low. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly and John Williams, who preceded her in that role before shifting to run ...

Bloomberg Barclays Plc’s Jes Staley promised more buybacks and dividends to shareholders as the bank’s traders outperformed most of their Wall Street and European peers. Fourth-quarter income at the London-based firm’s markets unit fell 2.5 percent from a year earlier to 945 million pounds ($1.2 billion), a performance that beat many of the bank’s rivals. While the last quarter of ...

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc is booking a $900 million charge tied to regulatory probes in its fourth-quarter results, a move that will erode earnings as its top executive prepares to unveil a turnaround plan. The provision will cover the UK bank’s estimates for potential penalties from investigations over US sanctions violations, currency trading issues and financial-crime controls, the company said. ...

Bloomberg The Philippines central bank remains guarded on monetary policy and is keeping a hawkish bias, Deputy Governor Diwa Guinigundo said, indicating it’s not ready to cut interest rates just yet. “We are more on the hawkish side in the sense that we recognize the risks on the market,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Nejra Cehic from ...

Bloomberg EY, the accounting firm engaged by Swedbank AB following a report that the lender was involved in money laundering, is being probed in Denmark over the Estonian dirty-money scandal surrounding Danske Bank A/S. The investigation of EY has been running since October, after Danske admitted that much of the $230 billion that flowed through a tiny Estonian branch between ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank (ECB) officials poised to debate the need for new long-term loans for banks might have some even bigger thinking to do. With less than two weeks to go before the Governing Council meets, policy makers are gearing up to discuss whether their response to the region’s economic slowdown should include an update to its targeted lending ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said the US central bank must improve its recruitment of women and people from minority backgrounds because greater diversity leads to better policy decisions. Noting that it was more than a century after the Fed’s creation that the one of its 12 regional banks was headed by an African American — Raphael Bostic, who ...

Bloomberg After being stung by the market turmoil at the end of last year, Singapore’s banks are bracing for fresh challenges from China-US trade tensions and a slowing world economy. “We expect ongoing global uncertainties to continue to weigh on business sentiment in the near term,” United Overseas Bank Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Wee Ee Cheong told reporters in Singapore ...