Banking

BRUSSELS / Reuters An early Easter helped drive a pick-up in euro zone inflation in March, keeping the European Central Bank on track with preparations to wind down its huge stimulus programme in coming months. Inflation in the 19 countries sharing the euro was 1.4 percent year-on-year, European Union statistics office Eurostat estimated on Wednesday — in line with market ...

Bloomberg Oman has the means to maintain its currency peg and has no plans to change it even though the decline in oil prices has hurt its finances, central bank Governor Tahir Al Amri said. Oman’s gross foreign currency reserves, which stood at $19.6 billion at the end of January, are enough to cover nearly nine months’ worth of imports, ...

BUCHAREST / Reuters Romania’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate on hold at 2.25 percent on Wednesday, it said, likely waiting to assess the impact of two consecutive hikes it delivered earlier this year on rising inflation. Nine of ten analysts polled by Reuters last month had expected the bank to hike interest rates by a quarter point. A ...

Bloomberg India’s government kicked off a party in the bond market last week. And the central bank won’t want to spoil that. While Governor Urjit Patel and his monetary policy committee have turned more hawkish on inflation recently, they are set to hold the benchmark interest rate at 6 percent, according to all 26 economists in a Bloomberg survey. That ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG needs to scale back its US operations and focus on serving European companies to unlock capital and improve returns, according to analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. The US business “consumes material balance sheet resources” while suffering from “persistently low profitability,” Kian Abouhossein and Amit Ranjan wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday. The alternative ...

Bloomberg China’s biggest lenders are increasingly using short-term financing to meet demand for loans, in a de-velopment that could push up money-market rates. The banks are rushing to sell negotiable certificates of deposit, an instrument that sounds like a saving account but is actually more like a bond. Issuance of these by the five largest lenders more than doubled to ...

DUBAI / Reuters Oman’s central bank said on Tuesday it is relaxing capital and credit exposure rules for commercial banks and taking other steps to boost lending in a bid to boost economic growth. The Omani economy and financial markets have come under pressure from low oil prices and rising US interest rates, which are closely linked to rial rates, ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is talking about how to eventually exit from its massive monetary stimulus program but it’s still too early to reveal details, Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told parliament on Tuesday. “Internally we’re conducting various discussions,” at the staff level, Kuroda said in response to a question from a lawmaker. How the BOJ normalises policy will depend ...

Bloomberg Societe Generale SA expects to be part of some “very large” deals involving Saudi Arabia this year, the bank’s chief executive officer for the Middle East said. “Saudi is the next big thing for us, so you will see us much more around very large Saudi Arabia transactions this year,” Richad Soundardjee said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. ...

SYDNEY / Reuters Australia’s central bank left interest rates at record lows on Tuesday, the longest stretch without a change in almost three decades, and looked set to extend this period of “masterful inaction” for some time yet. As widely expected, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) ended its April policy meeting with the benchmark rate at 1.5 percent, where ...