Banking

Bloomberg Mario Draghi said risks to the euro-area economy are worsening even as he called time on the European Central Bank’s flagship deflation-fighting tool. The ECB president told reporters in Frankfurt that while risks are still “broadly balanced,” they are now “moving to the downside” because of a range of concerns over geopolitics, trade protectionism and market volatility. The significant ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve officials will pull the trigger on another interest-rate increase next week before slowing the pace of hikes in 2019 as risks to the US economy mount, according to a new Bloomberg survey of economists. They expect the Fed will raise rates by a quarter percentage point at its December 18-19 meeting while dialing back the number of ...

Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of India’s board bought more time to review the government’s demand for a greater say in the central bank’s functioning, one of the issues that had fostered hostilities between the two sides. “The board deliberated on the governance framework of the Reserve Bank and it was decided that the matter required further examination,” the central bank ...

Bloomberg Taiwan’s banks, voracious lenders to Chinese companies in recent years, are starting to cool their appetite as they contemplate the longer-term consequences of the US-China trade war. Faced with low interest rates at home, Taiwanese lenders — renowned for their clout in Asia’s syndicated loan market — poured across into the mainland, so much so that the local regulator ...

Bloomberg Germany’s Bundesbank expressed confidence that the economy will quickly overcome its latest slowdown, even though it cautioned that growing protectionism and a disorderly Brexit pose threats to the outlook. The central bank lowered its growth forecasts for 2018 and 2019 and also cut its inflation outlook for next year. Output in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, contracted in the third ...

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 ...