Banking

Bloomberg Adrian Orr will oversee the biggest overhaul of New Zealand’s central bank since it pioneered inflation targeting in the early 1990s. Orr, 54, will begin a five-year term as governor of the Reserve Bank on March 27, Finance Minister Grant Robertson said in Wellington. A former deputy governor and chief economist at the RBNZ, Orr currently heads the New ...

Bloomberg The next governor of the Bank of Japan faces a “job from hell.” That’s according to Takeshi Fujimaki, a banker-turned-lawmaker who sees any attempt by Japan’s central bank to exit its prog- ram of unprecedented easing as triggering a Greek-like debt crisis. “This is the calm before the battle,” Fujimaki, an opposition Japan Innovation Party politician who once served ...

Bloomberg As stocks surge and consumer prices inch higher, investors say it’s time for the Bank of Ja-pan to reduce equity purchases that have been criticised for distorting the market. Sometime next year, the BOJ will cut its annual buying target for domestic exchange-traded funds by as much as a third from the current 6 trillion yen ($53 billion), says ...

Bloomberg Pakistan’s central bank allowed the rupee to decline as it bowed to persistent economic pressure, including widening deficits and declining foreign-exchange reserves. The rupee closed at 107 per dollar at the close on the interbank market, after falling as low as 109.5 per dollar, the State Bank of Pakistan said in an emailed statement. The currency — officially a ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc said its 5-year-old deferred prosecution agreement with Department of Justice has expired, signaling the US is satisfied with the bank’s improvements to its compliance systems after it was ensnared in a money-laundering scandal in Mexico. The Justice Department will file a motion with a court in the Eastern District of New York seeking the dismissal of ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank will spend 2018 guiding its bond-buying program to a gentle halt as the euro zone benefits from the most-synchronized economic growth in two decades, according to a Bloomberg survey. Policy makers, who have already agreed to halve monthly purchases to 30 billion euros ($35 billion) starting next month, will taper them to zero in the ...

Bloomberg The Labour Party is debating moving some of the Bank of England’s operations to Birmingham if it wins power in the next general election. The plans, first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed by the UK’s main opposition, are aimed at spreading investment across the country. They’re based on an analysis by the economist Graham Turner of GFC ...

Bloomberg China’s banks should increase their capital buffers to pro- tect against any sudden economic downturn following a credit boom, the International Monetary Fund said. In its first comprehensive assessment of China’s financial system since 2011, the IMF recommended “a gradual and targeted increase in bank capital.” In a worst-case scenario, IMF stress tests suggested the country’s lenders would face ...

Bloomberg ICICI Securities Ltd., a unit of India’s largest private-sector lender by assets, has picked arrangers for an initial public offering that could value the company at more than 200 billion rupees ($3.1 billion), people familiar with the matter said. The brokerage arm of ICICI Bank Ltd. selected Bank of America Corp (BofA) and Citigroup Inc. to advise on the ...

Bloomberg The financial industries of Sweden and Denmark were quick to criticise the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s completed framework, arguing it will hit Scandinavian lenders too hard. “The Basel standards will, if they are fully implemented in the EU and Sweden, have large negative effects for Swedish banks, their clients and the Swedish economy,” Hans Lindberg, the head of ...