Banking

Bloomberg Japan’s key inflation gauge ticked up in February, putting the Bank of Japan halfway to its goal of 2 percent. Yet a strengthening yen and the threat of a global trade war underscore the central bank’s vulnerability to global markets and events. Despite the progress made, inflation remains far from the BOJ’s target, while the yen’s 7 percent gain ...

Bloomberg Kenya’s biggest bank by market value is not giving up an inch as lenders go head-to-head with the government over what they can charge customers. The introduction of interest-rate caps in late 2016 has caused lending to grind to a near halt, spurring the International Monetary Fund to warn that growth in East Africa’s largest economy could suffer if ...

Bloomberg The Bank of England is piloting anonymous job applications to promote diversity. The more than three-century old central bank only appointed its first female senior official in 1988, according to a speech by Chief Operating Officer Joanna Place at an event in London. It’s one of a handful of new measures to boost the proportion of women at that ...

Bloomberg Most Asian central banks will stand pat for now, even with the Federal Reserve poised to raise borrowing costs this week. While previous tightening cycles in the US prompted many Asian nations to move in lockstep, things are different this time. Subdued inflation and healthy foreign reserves reduce the need to move quickly and the risk of a trade ...

Bloomberg China will now permit foreign companies to access its $27 trillion payments market, which will further open up the world’s second-largest economy. Foreign players can start applying for payment licenses and will be treated the same as local firms, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on Wednesday. Applicants must set up local units, establish payment infrastructure ...

Bloomberg Hoist Finance AB of Sweden is gearing up to buy non-performing credit portfolios from Greek banks as they prepare to offload loans that soured during the country’s debt crisis. “There’s been a lot of talk about Greece for a long time, but now it’s actually happening,” Klaus-Anders Nysteen, the chief executive officer of Hoist, said in an interview in ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank is on a slow walk towards concluding four years of quantitative easing, and that challenge might look easy compared with what comes next. While policy makers are comfortable with market expectations for bond purchases to end this year, the bigger specter of 2019 looms large. That’s when the Governing Council might dare to actually withdraw ...

Bloomberg Nordea Bank AB may be cutting thousands of jobs to go digital, but in its wealth management business, it’s hiring. The bank, which is moving its headquarters to Finland from Sweden for regulatory reasons, has hired about 75 people over the past year to help run its $400 billion wealth unit, according to its head, Snorre Storset. “Wealth management ...

DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s central bank has instructed banks to change the way they calculate their loan-to-deposit ratios, giving greater weight to long-term deposits in order to permit more lending, according to a report on the Maaal financial news website. The new rules, set to come into effect in early April, will introduce a weighting system for calculating a ...

Bloomberg China’s incoming central bank governor, Yi Gang, signalled that he’ll push to maintain the course of financial liberalisation set by his predecessor Zhou Xiaochuan. The National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, voted to approve President Xi Jinping’s choice for governor of the People’s Bank of China. Liu He, Xi’s top economic adviser, was named as a vice premier, indicating that ...