Banking

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s biggest banks are increasingly locking mortgage rates to lure customers from upstart rivals in the world’s least affordable housing market, where borrowing costs are soon expected to rise. HSBC Holdings Plc and BOC Hong Kong (Holdings) Ltd. are offering fixed rates of 1.68 percent for the first year of a new mortgage, lower than the 2.15 percent ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG agreed to pay about $4.5 million to settle a US regulator’s allegations that it misled clients about how much bonds backed by commercial mortgages were worth, earning the lender bigger profits than it should have made. Salespeople in its Deutsche Bank Securities unit induced customers to pay higher prices for bonds by misrepresenting how much the ...

Bloomberg Bank of England policy makers are uniting behind the key message of the Inflation Report, telling investors that interest-rate increases will come quicker than officials previously expected. Ian McCafferty, seen as one of the most hawkish members of the rate-setting panel, reiterated that on LBC Radio, saying it’s likely borrowing costs will rise earlier, and to a greater extent, ...

Bloomberg In his first two years running Credit Suisse Group AG, Tidjane Thiam has been putting out fires. Today there’s still smoke. The Swiss lender is expected to report a third straight annual loss, mainly due to a 2.3 billion-franc ($2.45 billion) writedown related to a change in US tax policy at the end of last year. Even without that ...

Bloomberg Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda says it’s the most significant challenge facing his economy. Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol says it’ll be tougher to manage than record levels of household debt or future Federal Reserve interest-rate increases. The issue perplexing Asia’s central bankers: demographics. And making matters worse is the realisation there’s very little they can do ...

Bloomberg India’s regulator unearthed about $3.6 billion of bad loans in the books of the country’s biggest bank, amplifying questions about distress in the financial sector given underreporting by some rivals as well. State Bank of India said an audit by the central bank showed soured debt was about 232 billion rupees ($3.6 billion) higher than what the state-run lender ...

Bloomberg Just 8 percent of cybersecurity heads at US financial firms report to the chief executive officer directly and more should do so to help facilitate decision-making, according to the Financial Services Information Sharing & Analysis Center. The industry group’s first-ever survey on the topic showed that 39 percent of chief information security officers report directly to the chief information ...

Bloomberg Australia’s banks, rocked by years of scandals and wrongdoing, risk having further misconduct exposed as a powerful government-appointed inquiry into the nation’s financial industry starts. The yearlong Royal Commission will examine the nation’s banks, insurers, financial services providers and pension funds, and consider whether regulators have enough power to tackle misconduct. The first public hearings will focus on allegations ...

Bloomberg Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, the state-rescued Italian bank, fell in Milan trading after it reported a fourth-quarter loss on weak revenue and restructuring costs. The shares were down 2.8 percent at 3.72 euros as of 9:55 a.m. The stock, which returned to trading on October 25 after an 10-month suspension, is now valued more than 43 ...

Bloomberg Peter Selman, hired out of retirement by Deutsche Bank AG to turn around Wall Street’s worst-hit equities business, wants to tap universities rather than rivals to do so. “We certainly have holes to fill and we’re hiring,” Selman, an ex- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner who joined the German lender in November, said in a phone interview. “But we’re ...