Banking

  ISTANBUL / AP Turkey’s currency has weakened to an all-time low against the dollar as parliament debates constitutional amendments that would hand the president sweeping executive powers and, critics say, limit checks and balances. The value of the Turkish lira has dropped nearly seven percent against the dollar since the start of the year. On Tuesday, it was trading ...

  RIYADH / Reuters Saudi Arabia has hired HSBC as financial advisor for its plans to privatise construction and management of school buildings, as it seeks to cut state spending in an era of low oil prices, a Saudi executive said on Tuesday. Tatweer Buildings Co, a state-owned firm affiliated with the Ministry of Education, aims to begin offering public-private ...

  Bloomberg The appetite for Australian banks to fund in the local bond market shows little sign of abating, with Commonwealth Bank of Australia selling A$2.65 billion ($1.95 billion) of notes less than two weeks into the new year. The deal is the earliest benchmark-sized local transaction from one of the country’s four largest banks since 2009 and follows a ...

  Bloomberg Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to inaugurate an international exchange in Gujarat state’s new finance zone, seeking to grab some of India’s $48 billion in offshore banking activities from Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong. The India International Exchange, at the bottom of a 16-storey building that dominates the finance zone, will start trading single stock and equity ...

  Bloomberg China’s foreign currency holdings fell for a sixth month in December, bringing last year’s drop to $320 billion as the yuan posted its steepest annual slide in more than two decades. Reserves decreased $41.1 billion to a fresh five-year low of $3.01 trillion, the People’s Bank of China said. That was in line with estimates in Bloomberg’s survey ...

  Bloomberg Jason Katz, a former Barclays Plc currency trader, admitted conspiring to fix prices in the foreign-exchange market, the third individual to be charged and the first to plead guilty in a long-running US criminal investigation into the rigging of currency rates. Katz appeared in Manhattan federal court, where he admitted to participating in a conspiracy with other bankers ...

  Bloomberg One of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s out-of-consensus calls for 2017 is already bearing fruit. While big investors are positioned for Turkey to do well, analysts led by Caesar Maasry recommended greater caution in a report — shortly before the lira plunged to a fresh lows against both the US dollar and the euro. The bank’s analysis of actively-managed ...

  Bloomberg Norway’s biggest bank, DNB ASA, has more capital than it needs and will probably start using the excess funds to buy back its own shares. After topping the European Banking Authority’s resilience score (DNB’s capital reserves were hardly affected in the stress tests’ ‘adverse’ scenario), the Oslo-based lender is now attracting investor interest as analysts predict shareholder rewards ...

  Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. (BofA) is poised to boost bonuses for many of its bond traders and trim payouts for those handling stocks, people with knowledge of the matter said. The combined compensation pool will drop significantly, though fewer workers will divvy the rewards. Senior executives have earmarked as much as 10 percent more to pay the fixed-income ...

  Bloomberg No wonder Germany is on the warpath against a proposed global standard for how banks calculate the capital they need: Its largest lenders rank among the worst when it comes to how they assess risk. That means Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG will be affected more than most big lenders and may have to raise additional capital, ...