Banking

Bloomberg The private-banking arm of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. is adding more staff in Dubai, as the Singapore lender se- eks a greater role managing the money of the Middle East’s wealthy and of Indians living overseas. Bank of Singapore plans to hire about 20 relationship managers next year to cater to non-resident Indians and rich people in the Arab world, ...

Bloomberg Australia’s central bank may start raising interest rates from a record low as soon as May, putting the brakes on house-price growth, according to hedge fund manager Brett Gillespie. A drop in the unemployment rate to 5 percent in the second quarter of next year will be the trigger for the Reserve Bank of Australia to start lifting rates, ...

Bloomberg Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is set to propose a new central bank governor this week, filling a position that’s been vacant since May as the government struggles to get its $17.5 billion bailout back on track with the International Monetary Fund. Poroshenko will reveal his nomination in the next two days, with parliament to vote on his proposal on ...

Bloomberg National Bank of Kuwait, the country’s largest lender, plans to hire hundreds of people and open more branches in Saudi Arabia and Egypt as it targets growth in the Middle East’s biggest markets. NBK, as the bank is known, will open in Riyadh and Dammam by the end of next year after opening its first branch in Saudi Arabia ...

Bloomberg South Korea’s goal of creating its own Goldman Sachs has stalled as big brokerages wait on approvals to raise new funds for expansion. The focus is on so-called promissory notes, short-term contracts that authorities had said brokerages might start using to raise funds to fuel their growth, as part of the government’s goal of creating a more active domestic ...

Bloomberg Ignazio Visco will defend the Bank of Italy’s oversight of the country’s lenders this we- ek after a crisis that led to taxpayer-funded bailouts, losses for small investors and a damaged reputation for the financial system abroad. As a two-and-half month probe by the country’s parliament into the industry comes to an end, Visco will make his long-awaited appearance ...

Bloomberg The pace at which the Bank of Japan is expanding its massive hoard of bonds will continue to slow in 2018, according to the majority of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The central bank will increase its Japanese government bond holdings by about 44 trillion yen ($392 billion) next year, according to the average estimate in the survey. That’s well ...

Bloomberg Three Fed rate hikes, two major European elections and the biggest drop in China’s currency since 2008 would normally make for a busy year for macro traders, leaving them optimistic come bonus time. Not this year. Investors haven’t found much to compel them to step up bets on the directions of interest rates and currencies in 2017, driving sharp ...

Bloomberg Mario Draghi stopped short of declaring that the European Central Bank will meet its inflation goal in 2020, signalling that the euro-area economy isn’t yet strong enough to warrant weaning off monetary stimulus. The ECB president unveiled updated economic projections that showed continued gro- wth over the next three years but only slowly improving consumer-price gains. Inflation will average ...

Bloomberg Big euro-area lenders face a choice; clean up the complicated corporate structures that make them difficult to wind down in a crisis, or watch Elke Koenig do it for them. Koenig, head of the Brussels-based Single Resolution Board, said in an interview that streamlining banks’ architecture and ensuring they can fund their own demise without taxpayers’ help will be ...