Banking

Bloomberg The European Union’s bank-failure rules are forcing Austria’s Volksbanken to open up the lending tap, a strategy reminiscent of the one that nearly brought down the cooperative group a few years ago. The irony has arisen because the EU requires banks to have sufficient loss-absorbing liabilities on their books to cover the costs of their restructuring and refinancing in ...

Bloomberg China’s banks are being offered cash and given instructions to lend more, as regulators attempt to support a slowing economy. The banking and insurance regulator has asked financial institutions to “earnestly implement” plans to help reduce financing costs for small firms, saying that big lenders should “take the lead”, according to a statement posted on its website. Meanwhile, the ...

Bloomberg The economy of South Korea, which is very reliant on China, may see more adverse impact than previously expected from China’s plan for deleveraging, the Bank of Korea said in a report on Sunday. South Korea’s gross domestic product growth could be 0.3 percentage point less than expected in 2018 and maybe 1.2 percentage point less in 2020 because ...

Bloomberg In the high-stakes drama of soured loans and failed investment banking ambitions that is European finance, Sergio Ermotti has a problem others would love to have: His UBS Group AG is starting to look a little dull. Seven years after a sweeping revamp of the bank, whose tilt toward wealth management became a blueprint for rivals, the chief executive ...

Bloomberg Banks are going even more mobile. US Bancorp this week was the latest to say it will build a nationally available checking-account product as lenders introduce mobile offerings that let consumers do their full banking without a branch. The move follows similar announcements by some of the country’s largest banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and PNC ...

Bloomberg The Nordic region’s biggest bank reported profit in the second quarter that exceeded market estimates, and committed to a forecast that it will make more money in 2018 than it did last year. Nordea Bank AB saw net income grow to 1.09 billion euros, just beating the 1.05 billion-euro estimate in a Bloomberg survey of analysts, according to a ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc. is expanding its Japan prime brokerage business serving global hedge funds by hiring four people from rivals including Deutsche Bank AG. Two of the recruits will take up newly created positions, division head Toshikatsu Furumi said in an interview. They are Thomas Morrison, who will join from Deutsche Bank in September as head of financial resource management, ...

Bloomberg Argentine Central Bank President Luis Caputo ditched a traditional press conference about monetary policy and instead held a question-and-answer session — with his own staff. It was the central bank’s first quarterly monetary policy report under Caputo, who took over the helm of the institution on June 14. His predecessor, Federico Sturzenegger, used to hold a press conference with ...

Bloomberg The currency war has arrived. So say some of the best and brightest in the $5.1 trillion-per-day foreign-exchange market. US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to accuse China and the European Union of “manipulating their currencies and interest rates lower.” The comments came after the yuan plunged past 6.80 per dollar for the first time in a year ...

Bloomberg For banks that finance trade in Asia, the tariff war between the US and China couldn’t come at a worse time. Lenders globally have faced declining revenue from the $9 trillion business of funding cross-border commerce for five years running, thanks to a drop in margins that is persisting in Asia. Now, as the trade dispute between the world’s ...