Banking

Bloomberg The Bank of Canada released an upbeat assessment of the country’s economic expansion, but reiterated the central bank will remain cautious as it seeks to bring interest rates back up to more normal levels. The outlook was delivered in a speech by Deputy Governor Tim Lane, a day after an interest-rate decision where the central bank left borrowing costs ...

Bloomberg Finland is promising it won’t add to the list of financial regulations facing Nordea Bank AB as the lender prepares to move its headquarters to the northernmost euro member. The pledge, made by Finance Minister Petteri Orpo, comes a week before shareholders in Nordea vote on its proposal to relocate from Stockholm. The largest Nordic lender, which has been ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank President Mario Draghi turned a spotlight on banks’ riskiest assets when he said they need to reduce their holdings of hard-to-value investments. A decade after the financial crisis, lenders in the region are still sitting on billions of dollars of illiquid holdings that could include the kind of mortgage-backed bonds and bespoke derivatives that sank lenders ...

Bloomberg Siam Commercial Bank Pcl, Thailand’s second-largest lender, is going digital and slashing branches and headcount in a bid to survive competition from emerging financial players. “Even though we are a large bank, we think of it as do or die,” Chief Strategy Officer Arak Sutivong said in an interview, referring to a $1 billion technology investment program and its ...

Bloomberg Traders have been taking some profits on their long positions in the Norwegian krone this week, but the latest inflation data has given them a reason to rethink. Norway’s February headline inflation beat the highest analyst estimate and rose above the central bank’s recently lowered 2 percent target, triggering a rally in the currency of 0.7 percent against the ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan stayed the course with its monetary stimulus at Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s final policy meeting before his new term begins next month. BOJ kept its yield-curve control settings and asset purchases unchanged, a result forecast by all economists surveyed by Bloomberg. And with inflation still far from the BOJ’s target, Kuroda made it clear that the ...

Bloomberg Central bankers around the world are grappling with the prospect of a global trade war sparked by US President Donald Trump’s plan to slap tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum. Here are extracts of some of the recent comments by central bank officials: AUSTRALIA Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe, whose economy ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank officials considering when to end their bond-buying program have a new reason to move carefully: US inflationary pressures are helping to push up euro-zone borrowing costs. President Mario Draghi and his colleagues spent years insulating the single-currency area from global financial markets as it recuperated from a double-dip recession, debt crisis and brush with deflation. Now ...

Bloomberg Malaysia’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged as expected, after inflation eased and an early rate hike this year helped to bolster the currency. Bank Negara Malaysia left the overnight policy rate at 3.25 percent, it said in a statement in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, as predicted by all 17 economists in a Bloomberg survey. As one ...

FRANKFURT / Reuters BlackRock, George Soros and big sovereign wealth funds are among investors expressing interest in buying stakes in the initial public offering of Deutsche Bank’s asset management arm, a person familiar with the matter said. The sovereign funds include Singapore’s Temasek, the person said. Deutsche Bank is finalising plans for the IPO of the asset management business, known ...