Banking

  Bloomberg Europe’s largest banks kicked off earnings season with pledges to return more than $12 billion to shareholders, following an interest rate bonanza that’s bolstering lenders from Milan to Stockholm. UBS Group AG Chief Executive Officer Ralph Hamers vowed to return more than $6.7 billion to shareholders this year, after income from lending to wealthy clients surged in the ...

  Bloomberg Citigroup Inc is hiring Cyril Besseddik from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to lead coverage of health-care companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for its investment bank. Besseddik is set to join Citigroup’s banking, capital markets advisory group in May and will be based in London, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News. He was ...

  Bloomberg PayPal Holdings Inc. said it will cut 2,000 staffers as it contends with a macroeconomic slowdown that’s weighed on the firm’s business in recent quarters. The cuts, which will affect about 7% of employees, will take place in the coming weeks, Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman told employees. “While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost ...

  Bloomberg Kenya surprised most analysts by keeping its benchmark interest rate unchanged for the first time since July, as it sees inflation declining in the near term. The monetary policy committee held the rate at 8.75%, Governor Patrick Njoroge said in an emailed statement. Only two of five economists in a Bloomberg survey expected the rate to remain unchanged. ...

  Bloomberg Brazil’s central bank will likely hold its interest rate steady for the fourth straight meeting as inflation expectations rise further above target and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva questions the institution’s goals. All 32 economists in a Bloomberg survey expect board members to keep the benchmark Selic rate unchanged at 13.75%, when the central bank wraps up ...

  Bloomberg Europe could boost bank lending by as much as €4.5 trillion ($4.9 trillion) by lightening the industry’s regulatory burden, according to a study commissioned by the region’s banking lobby. That increase of almost 30% would stem from bringing demands for European banks’ capital reserves and related costs more in line with those of US competitors, consultant Oliver Wyman ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG’s investment bank underperformed US peers in the fourth quarter, as equities revenue slumped and the Swiss firm failed to match gains in fixed-income trading. Revenue at the equities division — about twice the size of the debt and forex business — fell about 20% to $883 million, compared with declines of about half that on Wall ...

  Bloomberg Overseas funds piled into UK government bonds at an unprecedented pace in December 2022, one of the strongest signs yet that a market written off as broken just months ago is on the mend. Non-residents bought £38.3 billion ($47 billion) of gilts last month, figures published by the Bank of England (BOE) on Tuesday showed. A “portion of ...

  Bloomberg The Chinese central bank will extend the use of three monetary policy tools designed to encourage financial institutions to support green technologies and the logistics sector, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said in a statement. The bank will continue to offer cheap funding until the end of 2024 to banks which lend to firms that are helping ...

  Bloomberg Pakistan’s rupee advanced from a record low as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) team is set to start negotiations over the resumption of its $6.5 billion bailout. The rupee climbed 1.7% to 265 per dollar, after sliding to an unprecedented 270, according to the foreign—exchange desk at Arif Habib Ltd. The benchmark stock index climbed 1.9%, snapping a two-day ...