Banking

  Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. said fourth-quarter profit rose 24 percent as the biggest U.S. bank set aside less money for bad loans and bond-trading revenue increased more than analysts estimated. Earnings benefited from better credit quality among U.S. consumers and corporations, allowing the bank to pull about $400 million from bad-loan reserves in the mortgage, energy and metals ...

  Bloomberg Turkey’s central bank is taking more steps to prop up a tumbling currency by forcing banks to borrow at a higher rate, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The lira surged against the dollar. The central bank didn’t offer any funding to local lenders at 8 percent through the one-week repo auction on Thursday, with ...

  Bloomberg National Bank of Oman (NBO), the sultanate’s third-largest lender by assets, posted on Thursday a 19.9 percent fall in fourth-quarter net profit, according to Reuters calculations. The lender made a profit of 13.68 million rials ($35.5 million) in the three months to Dec. 31, Reuters calculated based on previous financial statements in lieu of a quarterly breakdown. This ...

  Bloomberg Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA is set to become Italy’s biggest nationalized bank since the 1930s after its failure to raise funds on the market set a state rescue in motion. Talks are underway between the Italian Treasury and the lender on developing a new business plan. The European Central Bank directed Monte Paschi to raise ...

  Emirates Business VMware, Inc., a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, announced that Al-Mawarid Bank is deploying VMware NSX network virtualization to improve security and application continuity, accelerate product innovation through IT automation, and meet stringent regulatory compliance requirements. Al-Mawarid Bank is a fast-growing, Lebanese bank that invests in the latest technologies to stay ahead of the ...

  Bloomberg Azerbaijan will transfer as much as 7.5 billion manat ($4 billion) of assets from its sovereign wealth fund to the central bank this year, giving it ammunition to defend the manat in the latest effort to break the grip of a currency crisis. The regulator will use the money to ‘ensure macroeconomic stability’ in 2017, according to a ...

  Bloomberg Canadian banks started their 2017 funding programs by selling a record amount of bonds backed by residential mortgages abroad, taking advantage of lower borrowing costs amid demand for their top-rated debt. The country’s biggest financial institutions have sold about $6 billion in covered bonds denominated in euros, US dollars and pounds this year, the most on record for ...

  Reuters Qatar’s Masraf Al Rayan, an Islamic lender, has mandated banks for a sukuk of around $500 million, banking sources said on Wednesday. This would be one of a likely series of debt issues in the first quarter by Gulf banks seeking US dollar funding to improve their liquidity, which has been hurt by low oil prices. Abu Dhabi ...

  Bloomberg The Turkish central bank’s thinly veiled pledge to take action to stem the lira’s bought only a short reprieve before the slump continued. By just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday in Istanbul, the lira was trading down 1.7 percent against the dollar — weaker than its level prior to the central bank’s statement about an hour earlier and ...

  Bloomberg China will face more frequent liquidity shocks this year, according to the manager of the nation’s biggest money-market fund, which plans to hold extra cash to protect against the risk of rising redemptions. The government’s efforts to curb risk in the financial system and support the sliding yuan are likely to ‘over-stretch a rope that’s already tight,’ said ...