Banking

Bloomberg Commonwealth Bank of Australia reported its eighth consecutive year of record profit, driven by growth in mortgage and business lending. Cash profit, which excludes one-time items, rose 4.6 percent to A$9.88 billion ($7.8 billion) in the 12 months ended June 30, from A$9.45 billion a year earlier, the Sydney-based lender said in a filing Wednesday. That compares with the ...

Bloomberg Mizuho Financial Group Inc. wants to grow its business managing overseas corporate money by $100 billion this fiscal year, as it seeks new ways to boost international earnings at a time of negative interest rates at home. “We’re expanding with a focus on the cross-border transactions of non-Japanese corporations doing business in Asia,” Zenichi Tanakamaru, a senior vice president ...

Bloomberg The Bank of England presented a fresh downbeat assessment of the UK economy, highlighting slower consumer spending and weak wage growth, reinforcing the view that an interest-rate increase is far from imminent. A report by the BOE’s regional agents published on Wednesday said that the initial impact of the weaker pound on prices may be almost done, goods-price inflation ...

Bloomberg A gain from selling Asian private-banking assets and an expanding Dutch economy helped ABN Amro Group NV reinforce its capital position and more than double quarterly profit. Net income in the three months through June rose to $1.13 billion from 391 million euros a year earlier, the Amsterdam-based bank said on Wednesday. That beat the 762 million-euro average estimate ...

Bloomberg Delivering yet another jolt to Russia’s central bank, last month brought a new surprise after an inflationary shock in June. The unexpected reading in the consumer-price index pushed it below the Bank of Russia’s target of 4 percent months ahead of a year-end deadline, as a surge in food costs fizzled out. But when it comes to the direction ...

Bloomberg Wealth managers’ revenue stagnated last year even as firms boosted assets by almost 4 percent, highlighting how the pressure on fees is increasingly spreading to the lucrative business of managing rich people’s money. Companies responded by cutting expenses to bring the cost-income ratio, a measure of profitability, below 80 percent for the first time since 2012, according to a ...

Bloomberg As Denmark reconsiders joining Europe’s bank union, the two biggest parties in the country’s parliament are voicing considerable skepticism. The divisions suggest it’s far from obvious that Denmark will become part of a union that so far only counts euro-zone nations. The minority coalition of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen has given itself two years to decide. The EU-skeptic ...

Bloomberg Wall Street banks are being invited by one of their key watchdogs to offer guidance for how to revise the Volcker Rule, one of the industry’s least favourite regulations. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that it is seeking public comment on the Dodd-Frank Act measure that restricts banks’ ability to place market bets with their ...

Bloomberg Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) Chief Executive Officer Ian Narev has been stripped of his short-term bonus as the lender battles to contain the fallout from allegations it breached money-laundering and terrorist-financing laws more than 50,000 times. The board decided to scrap short-term bonuses for Narev and other senior executives after “consideration to risk and reputation matters impacting the ...

Bloomberg The Bank of England secretly plugged a multi-million-pound hole in Britain’s finances during World War I, covering up the failure of one country’s apparent patriotic triumphs. In the early days of the war in 1914, the government sought to raise 350 million pounds—about 38 billion pounds today— through the issuance of a War Loans, with 250 million pounds of ...