Banking

Bloomberg The Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) biggest private shareholder sold 10 percent of his stake in 2017, capitalising on the thinly traded stock’s mystifying rally. Theo Siegert, a German businessman and professor, held 6,070 shares — or 6.07 percent of the SNB — as of Dec. 31, down from 6,720 a year earlier, the central bank said in its annual ...

Bloomberg For the first time in a decade, the world’s central banks are looking beyond the dollar to build their currency reserves. With US protectionism on the rise, a number of Wall Street strategists say the case for the euro has rarely been better. Existential crises that hobbled the European experiment have receded. A resurgent economy has spurred talk the ...

Bloomberg Banks that spent years lobbying against billions of dollars of new capital requirements are being rewarded for their efforts. They won concessions from global regulators that may cut the amount of extra capital the industry’s biggest companies will need in 2022, when the new market-risk rules are due to take effect. The proposed revisions will come as a relief ...

Bloomberg For Australian banks the jabs just keep coming — and not always from the most expected sources. Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ Bank) is facing a civil suit in Guam over lending standards at its American Samoa offshoot. Two retired US military veterans claim the Melbourne-based bank is liable for “systematic violations of the Truth in ...

Bloomberg Developments in fintech could boost the UK’s sluggish productivity growth and the Bank of England has started a unit to monitor its developments, Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden said. “We have set up a new Fintech Hub that will sit at the heart of the bank, to consider both how the bank understands and how it applies fintech, relevant to ...

Bloomberg The Philippine central bank left its benchmark interest rate at a record low as it forecast inflation will remain inside the target band this year and in 2019. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas held the overnight borrowing rate at 3 percent, it said in a statement in Manila, as predicted by 11 of 17 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The rest ...

Bloomberg Two regional Federal Reserve bank presidents said they favour raising interest rates twice more this year following a hike this week, but were open to shifting their views if the outlook warranted a different policy approach. “My forecast had three moves for this year,’’ Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, who votes this year on monetary policy, told reporters after ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank is making sure its bond-buying program doesn’t run into any problems in Germany in the final stretch. Six months before purchases are currently set to expire, the ECB added seven German regional development agencies to the list of institutions whose debt is eligible for quantitative easing. The expansion was done at the request of the ...

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp.’s corporate and investment banking division agreed to pay $42 million to settle a New York state probe into a so-called masking scheme in which it misled clients about who was seeing and filling their orders and who was trading in its dark pool. Bank of America Merrill Lynch for years, starting in 2008, had trading ...

Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. considers itself a leader among banks fighting climate change. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon lauded the 2015 global Paris accord, and the bank has committed to buying and financing clean energy, as well as reducing its coal-industry work. Yet the bank is the top US lender and financier to oil-sands producers and pipeline companies, according ...