Banking

Bloomberg Commerzbank AG has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Rothschild & Co. as financial advisers as the German lender faces possible takeover bids from European competitors, the Financial Times reported, citing unidentified people. The firms are advising Commerzbank on its options and not necessarily preparing a defense strategy for any acquisition attempt, the newspaper reported one of the people ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) will halve monthly bond purchases to €30 billion ($35 billion) next year, stretching out the programme’s remaining capacity as it waits for inflation to pick up, a Bloomberg survey of economists shows. Policy makers will keep buying for about nine months to take the programme to just over €2.5 trillion, respondents said before the ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc named Jayant Rikhye as chief executive officer of its India unit, to replace Stuart Milne. Rikhye, currently the bank’s head of International for the Asia-Pacific region, will start his new role on December 1, according to an emailed statement from the London-based lender. Milne, who has been India CEO for five years, will take a three-month ...

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch was fined 34.5 million pounds ($45.5 million) for failing to report two years’ worth of exchange traded derivative transactions, in what UK regulators said was the first penalty under the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR). The Financial Conduct Authority said Merrill failed to report 68.5mn transactions between February 2014 and 2016. The bank ...

Bloomberg Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. reached a last-minute settlement with the nation’s securities regulator over allegations it rigged a benchmark interest rate. The in-principle agreement was announced on the first day of a court hearing over allegations ANZ Bank, Westpac Banking Corp. and National Australia Bank Ltd. traders sought to manipulate the benchmark bank bill swap rate ...

ISTANBUL / Reuters Turkey and Iran’s central banks have formally agreed to trade in their local currencies, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in a move aimed at increasing bilateral trade. Under the deal, the Iranian rial and Turkish lira will be easily converted to help reduce the costs of currency conversion and transfer for traders. The countries had been using ...

Bloomberg Japanese banks may have too many employees and branches, and overcapacity is contributing to a drop in earnings power that may hurt financial system, according to the nation’s central bank. “The low profitability of Japanese financial institutions is striking from an international perspective,” the Bank of Japan said in its twice-yearly financial system report. The number of employees and ...

Bloomberg Smaller Asian bond investors overlooked by banks are increasingly turning to exchange-traded funds to get exposure to fixed income, according to BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest money manager. “Banks are using their balance sheet for bigger institutions,” said Sean Cunningham, head of capital markets and fixed income for iShares and index investing in Asia-Pacific at BlackRock, whose assets under ...

DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank (NCB), the kingdom’s largest lender, reported a 8.4 percent rise in third-quarter net profit on Sunday, helped by a fall in expenses and provisions for bad loans. The bank made a net profit of 2.13 billion riyals ($568 million) in the three months to September 30, it said in a bourse statement. ...

Bloomberg New Zealand reminded currency traders this week of the power of politics to roil financial markets. The challenge is to figure out which world capital — from Tokyo to Washington — will deliver the next jolt. The kiwi tumbled as much as 2 percent and extended those losses as the opposition Labour Party won enough support in parliament to ...