Banking

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 ...

Bloomberg Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc Chairman Howard Davies said banks’ dire warnings about Brexit are finally getting through to the British government. “In recent weeks we have seen a much greater realisation of the much greater disruptive impact of a disorderly Brexit,” Davies said Friday. “The fact that the Bank of England has asked people to share their ...

Bloomberg Commonwealth Bank of Australia has blamed a software coding error for more than 50,000 alleged breaches of money-laundering and terrorist-financing laws. The error went undetected for almost three years, the Sydney-based bank said in its first detailed response after being sued August 3 by the country’s financial crime agency. Austrac alleged the bank failed to report on time or ...

Bloomberg Indonesia’s central bank has signaled a return to the easing bias that dominated its rates agenda last year. Bank Indonesia was Asia’s biggest rate cutter in 2016, easing policy six times until it hit the pause button late in the year. Now, with price pressures fading again, the bank’s governor Agus Martowardojo has said policymakers aren’t closing the door ...

Bloomberg It took six meetings for cracks to become visible within India’s powerful interest rate-setting panel. Following a series of consensus voting and bland statements, there was open dissent on the monetary policy committee in June, which only worsened last week when a member of the Reserve Bank of India’s economic research wing broke ranks for the first time with ...