Banking

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 ...

Bloomberg Sagging economic growth in India is complicating efforts to clean up a mountain of bad debt at the nation’s banks. Loans worth Rs17,00,000 crore ($26 billion) have been withdrawn in total since the 2001 inception of the corporate debt restructuring (CDR) mechanism through to the end of August, according to the latest data from the agency that brokers agreements ...

Bloomberg Some European Central Bank (ECB) policy makers see room for little more than 200 billion euros ($235 billion) of purchases under the institution’s bond-buying programme next year, according to central-bank officials familiar with the matter. The ECB is likely to run out of available debt under current rules at just over 2.5 trillion euros, the officials said, asking not ...

Bloomberg Bitcoin bubble or just the beginning? Or both? Those are the questions being asked on Wall Street to Main Street after the digital currency breached $5,000 for the first time, pushing this year’s gains to more than fivefold. As recently as December, bitcoin was trading at less than $1,000. Since then, it has dodged everything from tightening regulations, feuding ...

Bloomberg Kenya’s central bank may slightly lower its 2017 economic growth forecast to reflect uncertainty from this month’s unexpected presidential election do-over, said Governor Patrick Njoroge. “The growth rate won’t be as strong as we expected, but I don’t think we can say that we’ve gone over the precipice,” Njoroge said in an interview in Washington on Saturday, where he ...