Banking

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve is piling up unrealised losses on its $4.1 trillion bond portfolio, raising questions about its finances at a politically dicey moment for the independent central bank. The Fed had losses of $66.5 billion on its securities holdings on September 30, if it marked them to market, according to its latest quarterly financial report. That dwarfed its ...

Bloomberg A year ago, Tidjane Thiam asked Credit Suisse Group AG shareholders to stay with the bank through its restructuring. Those that did may still be left wanting more. Switzerland’s second-largest bank plans to buy back as much as 3 billion francs ($3 billion) of shares in the next two years, while increasing the dividend by at least 5 percent ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s banks are staring at a tough year for business, marred by lower demand for loans and a peak in local property prices. Goldman Sachs Group Inc cut the lenders’ loan-growth estimates and target prices. Citigroup Inc said the banks’ shares may drop as much as 15 percent in 2019. “A cyclical slowdown in loan growth has been ...

Bloomberg India’s new central bank governor has a list of challenges to face as he takes office: from fixing a banking crisis to convincing investors of the institution’s autonomy. Shaktikanta Das, 61, a former economic affairs secretary at the Finance Ministry, took charge at the Reserve Bank of India for a three-year term on Wednesday, two days after Urjit Patel ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG reached a deal worth hundreds of millions of Swiss francs to use Microsoft Corp cloud services in a bid to reduce costs while complying with strict Swiss privacy laws, according to people familiar with the matter. Switzerland’s largest bank may begin to store data at Microsoft’s purpose-built facilities near Zurich and Geneva as soon as next ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank didn’t overstep its mandate by setting up a quantitative-easing program to stave off deflation, judges at the European Union’s top court ruled. The ECB’s bond purchasing program is in line with the law, the EU Court of Justice said, dismissing the latest in a series of challenges from critics who argue the tool deployed by ...

Bloomberg Morgan Stanley is optimistic on emerging-market bonds looking ahead to 2019. Some of its clients less so. “We’ve spent the last two weeks discussing our year-ahead outlook with investors. We received pushback on our constructive view on EM fixed income,” Morgan Stanley strategists including James Lord wrote in a note. “Chief among concerns is the global growth outlook and ...

Bloomberg Urjit Patel’s shock exit as governor of the Reserve Bank of India has roiled financial markets. The rupee dropped as much as 1.6 percent against the dollar in early trading on Tuesday, reacting to Patel’s decision to quit nine months before the end of his three-year term for “personal reasons.” Patel’s RBI had been at loggerheads with the government ...

Bloomberg Jerome Powell is ramping up Federal Reserve communication to build public trust and help insulate it from political attack. In recent weeks, the Fed has announced a series of initiatives, including a monetary-policy review roadshow, a semi-annual assessment of financial stability, and its inaugural Supervision and Regulation Report. These follow Powell’s early promise of “plain-English’’ explanations and a doubling ...

Bloomberg As market odds increase that the Federal Reserve will pause its rate-hike path, Goldman Sachs says its prediction for a weaker dollar could come sooner rather than later. Over the past week, worsening US economic data — including a tepid jobs report — have led some to consider the chance of a Fed pause in 2019. Goldman Sachs joined ...