Banking

Bloomberg The European Central Bank won’t make much progress raising interest rates because it’ll tighten just as the US economy slows, predicts Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Andrew Bosomworth. “I don’t think Europe will get very far above zero,” Bosomworth, a managing director at Pimco, said in an interview in Frankfurt this week. “There’ll be a very short window in which ...

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc is working on a three-year plan to improve profitability as a share slump this year puts pressure on the emerging markets lender to boost returns. While operating expenses fell by 1 percent in the third quarter and were below estimates, its key measure of profitability is still lagging. The bank said on Wednesday that it will ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG is weighing acquisitions and joint-ventures for its asset management business to help it compete with larger rivals, people with knowledge of the matter said. Targets may include UK and US asset managers focussed on retail clients and specialised asset managers in areas such as real estate, the people said, asking not to be identified because the ...

Bloomberg India sought to defuse growing tensions with its central bank following reports that the government had cited a never-used legal provision in trying to resolve disagreements with the monetary authority. The Finance Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday it respects the autonomy of the Reserve Bank of India. That was after news broke that government officials had written ...

Bloomberg The ultimate guarantor of job security for presidential whipping boy Jerome Powell may lie not in Washington, but on Wall Street. President Donald Trump could confront a huge blow back from the financial markets — with stocks, bonds and the dollar all going down — if he made a serious move to oust the Federal Reserve chairman, market professionals ...

Bloomberg The South African Reserve Bank sees higher interest rates in the next two years to help contain accelerating inflation. The central bank’s quarterly projection model forecasts a benchmark rate of 7.7 percent by the end of 2020 compared to 6.5 percent currently, it said in its six-monthly Monetary Policy Review released in Pretoria, the capital. While policy will remain ...

Bloomberg BNP Paribas SA joined Deutsche Bank AG in reporting steep third-quarter declines at its debt-trading business, complicating Chief Executive Officer Jean-Laurent Bonnafe’s plans to meet 2020 profit and growth targets. The French bank posted a sixth consecutive quarterly contraction in revenue from buying and selling bonds, currencies and commodities, while gains from equities trading were also lower than analysts ...

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. plans to reward staff with special bonuses for a second straight year after seeing profits soar on tax cuts and a focus on expenses that’s elimin-ated thousands of jobs in recent months. The lender will give $1,000 cash bonuses in December to eligible employees making less than $100,000 annually, Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan said ...

Bloomberg A growing rift between India’s central bank and the government has been many months in the making. In the latest move, the Reserve Bank of India made its disagreement with authorities public in a hard-hitting speech by Deputy Governor Viral Acharya — which he said had the backing of Governor Urjit Patel — defending the central bank’s independence. Failure ...

Bloomberg Italy’s populist leaders are focussing on how to shield the nation’s banks in case market pressure worsens amid a standoff with the European Union over the government’s budget plan. Premier Giuseppe Conte asked government entities to prepare options to help the lenders if the decline in the value of their holdings of government debt requires them to recapitalise, Corriere ...