Banking

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. boosted an estimate for potential legal losses by $500 million while disclosing that it’s in early talks to resolve another round of probes into sales abuses at its branches. The company said it might have to spend as much as $2.7 billion more than what it set aside by the end of December to resolve ...

Bloomberg Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. agreed to buy DZ Bank’s aviation finance division in one of its biggest acquisitions since it was created in 2005. The assets MUFG bought from Germany’s second-largest bank, held by its subsidiary DVB Bank, include a loan portfolio of 5.6 billion euros ($6.4 billion) as well as the unit’s employees and “parts of the ...

Bloomberg South Korea’s central bank left its key interest rate unchanged as the outlook for Asia’s fourth-largest economy weakens amid falling exports, soft jobs growth and waning inflation. The Bank of Korea kept the seven-day repurchase rate at 1.75 percent, as forecast by all 26 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Most economists expect the BOK to leave borrowing costs where they ...

Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. is considering setting up a private bank in China as new regulations give foreign firms a better chance to compete with local players in the world’s second-biggest pool of wealthy people. The New York-based bank is doing a “feasibility study” on China’s onshore wealth business as part of broader plans to expand in the nation, ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said a healthy US economy has faced some “crosscurrents and conflicting signals” that officials in January decided warranted taking a patient approach to future interest-rate changes. With inflation pressures “muted,” the Federal Open Market Committee in its decision last month to keep interest rates unchanged “determined that the cumulative effects’’ of its actions and ...

Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet agreed to extend Jens Weidmann’s term as head of the Bundesbank by another eight years from May as he waits to see if he is picked later this year for the top job at the European Central Bank. The decision, which needs formal approval from President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was taken at a meeting on ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan may resort to its least preferred tool to expand stimulus next time the yen jumps: more government bond purchases. That’s according to Takahide Kiuchi, a former BOJ policy board member who said the central bank’s favored option — deepening negative interest rates — would face opposition from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration because it would ...

Bloomberg Metro Bank Plc, the lender founded by US entrepreneur Vernon Hill, plunged to a record low after it disclosed that British regulators are probing how it misclassified assets, an incident that prompted a share sale. Shares in Metro Bank tumbled as much as 20.8 percent to 1,030 pence, the lowest since the London-based lender first sold stock to the ...

Bloomberg Banco Santander SA may return to using a scrip dividend a year after saying it would reward shareholders entirely in cash, in a sign that it’s concerned about capital. Spain’s biggest bank said it would combine any such payout with share repurchases to avoid diluting the existing stock. The lender also decided to increase its medium-term dividend payout target ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve policy makers see 2019 marking the end of their balance sheet run-off, but not necessarily their interest-rate increases. Minutes of the central bank’s January 29-30 policy meeting released showed “almost all participants” agreeing it best to halt roll-offs this year, a move that should be welcomed by investors worried the balance sheet draw-down is hurting the economy. ...