Banking

Bloomberg If you’re the chief executive of a Wall Street firm whose fortunes have been tied to fickle trading markets, it helps to have a Plan B. For James Gorman, that’s Morgan Stanley’s wealth-management division, which produced nearly half of the firm’s revenue in the third quarter, the most in six reporting periods. For Lloyd Blankfein at rival Goldman Sachs ...

Bloomberg Axis Bank Ltd., India’s third-largest private-sector bank, slumped the most in two years after profit missed estimates and it forecast higher credit costs. The stock fell as much as 9.4 percent in Mumbai trading, the biggest intraday drop since August 2015, and traded 8.3 percent lower at 470.35 rupees as of 11:46 a.m. local time. The lender reported second-quarter ...

Bloomberg Lendify AB’s name may echo that of music streaming behemoth Spotify but the peer-to-peer lender’s real inspiration is vacation-rental giant Airbnb Inc. With lofty role models such as those, the unprofitable Stockholm-based company is planning a third financing round and has sold more bonds as it targets growing its loan book 40-fold over the next five years. Lendify is ...

Bloomberg Kenya’s central bank is communicating a sense of normalcy and continuity to investors amid uncertainty about the country’s protracted elections, Governor Patrick Njoroge said. Institutions including the nation’s courts show Kenya is a ‘mature’ democracy, Njoroge said. While liquidity in the country’s money markets is tight at the moment, it has “nothing to do with the political circumstances,” he ...

Bloomberg China’s banks are still bingeing on short-term financing, defying analyst predictions that they would wean themselves off such debt as regulators intensify a crackdown on leverage. Sales of negotiable certificates of deposit — a key funding source for medium and smaller banks — surged 49 percent from a year ago in the third quarter to a record 5.4 trillion ...

Bloomberg Thailand rejected claims that it engages in unfair currency practices to gain a trade advantage, even as the nation appears close to meeting US criteria on exchange-rate manipulation. In fact, the central bank faces criticism for doing too little to curb gains in the baht, the strongest performer in Asia this year, according to Commerce Minister Apiradi Tantraporn. Countries ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG, Switzerland’s second-largest bank, is being targeted by a little-known local activist investor who says he wants to break up the lender into three parts. Rudolf Bohli, who manages 250 million francs ($256 million) at RBR Capital Advisors, has taken a 0.2 percent stake in Credit Suisse, worth about 100 million francs, according to a person ...

Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) says economic conditions at home and abroad ‘had been more positive since 2016,’ according to minutes of this month’s policy meeting where interest rates were left unchanged. National accounts indicated private non-mining business investment increased in the June quarter to be almost 10% higher than at the start of 2016. Public consumption had ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc’s former head of currency trading in London made at least $500,000 in commissions by front-running a multi-billion-dollar deal that betrayed the bank’s duty to its client, according to US prosecutors. The allegations, made in court documents handed out at the start of a two-day hearing, form part of the US government’s petition to extradite Stuart Scott ...

Bloomberg Some Qatari banks are becoming less willing to sell dollars to foreign lenders amid a lingering regional standoff with a Saudi-led alliance, according to people familiar with the matter. Foreign exchange activity between local and international banks is almost at a standstill, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. The central bank is ...