Banking

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 ...

Bloomberg Indonesia’s incoming central bank governor vowed to ensure the stability of the currency as emerging markets brace for further volatility on the back of rising interest rates in the US and elsewhere. The Indonesian parliament on Tuesday confirmed Perry Warjiyo, 59, as the next governor of Bank Indonesia following last week’s endorsement of lawmakers from a committee responsible for ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG is preparing to reshuffle its supervisory board as the future of Chief Executive Officer John Cryan and Chairman Paul Achleitner is called into question. John Thain, a former CEO of Merrill Lynch, is expected to join the troubled German bank in May, according to a person with knowledge of the lender’s plans. He is one of ...

Bloomberg Volatility may be here to stay — but there’s a lot investors can do to prepare for it. “Hedges against late cycle volatility bursts in credit, dispersion and cross-asset volatility as the equity/bond correlation itself becomes more volatile” are one key theme in Societe Generale SA’s second-quarter outlook from strategists led by Kokou Agbo-Bloua, the firm’s head of flow ...

Bloomberg Unity Bank Plc, a Nigerian lender, denied entering a binding agreement with private-equity firm Milost Global Inc. over a potential $1 billion investment, saying talks were only preliminary and didn’t come with any commitments. New York-based Milost this week said it terminated talks to provide debt and equity funding to Unity, saying it received threats that it will be ...

Bloomberg Bulgaria, which is seeking to cement its path to euro adoption this year, said it has no plans to join Europe’s banking union before switching to the common currency. The Balkan nation wants to join the exchange-rate mechanism — the waiting room for euro adoption — this summer. While becoming a member of the union before entering the euro ...

Bloomberg Bostjan Jazbec, a member of the European Central Bank’s Governing Council, will step down as the head of Slovenia’s monetary authority April 30, opening the way for a new government to choose his replacement after elections this summer. Jazbec will become a member of the Single Resolution Board, the European Union body responsible for the orderly winding down of ...

BEIRUT / Reuters Lebanon’s government plans to swap $5 billion of new foreign currency bonds for Lebanese pound debt with the central bank, in an operation its finance minister suggested would slash the cost of servicing its huge debt pile by as much as $1.5 billion. Ali Hassan Khalil, speaking in parliament, said 218 billion pounds ($145 million) of the ...

Bloomberg Japanese banks must move forward with consolidation by using everything from mergers to informal tie-ups to tackle declining profitability, according to the new chief of the industry’s main lobby group. “Consolidation has to advance from here, and the formats for doing this are going to get more diverse,” Koji Fujiwara, who starts as chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association ...