Banking

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG, seeking to shore up capital, has said it wants to sell or spin off German retail-banking unit Postbank. Standing in the way: bonds known as CoCos. Blame it on conflicting accounting rules. While Deutsche Bank has taken a multi-billion-euro writedown for Postbank in accounts based on international standards, it hasn’t done so on its income ...

  Bloomberg Africa’s many small and under-capitalized banks, laden with bad debt, are inflicting more pain on already embattled economies. Regulators may have no choice but to force lenders to consolidate or close. A third of Nigeria’s 21 banks may be under-capitalized. Much smaller Uganda has 25 banks and last month suffered one collapse. Kenya has had three failures since ...

  Bloomberg As part of the International Monetary Fund’s biggest review of China’s banking system in half a decade, a top official recently did some detective work that didn’t involve an Excel spreadsheet. On a trip to the mega-city of Chongqing in the nation’s interior, Ratna Sahay, acting director of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, visited a property ...

  Bloomberg Mark Carney says he’s staying at the Bank of England (BOE). He’s just not saying what he’s going to do. With his forecasting record proving patchy, the governor’s latest message is that the next move could be to tighten or loosen policy. A few months ago, policy makers foresaw a second interest-rate cut after the Brexit vote, while ...

  CAIRO / Reuters Egypt’s pound was almost steady early on Sunday as banks began trading freely for the first time since authorities ditched the currency’s peg in a policy shift designed to crush a black market and clinch an International Monetary Fund loan. Interbank trading began at 1030 a.m. (0830 GMT) but activity was extremely slow because banks were ...

  Bloomberg The European Union is raising the pressure on global banking regulators to ease proposed capital rules in an effort to protect lenders and the economy from major new costs. The European Parliament will add its voice next week to a chorus of resistance from EU regulators and policy makers including German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. Lawmakers plan a ...

  Bloomberg China International Capital Corp., the bank that has brought some of the country’s biggest state-owned firms to market, agreed to buy China Investment Securities Co. to gain a foothold in the retail-brokerage business. CICC, known as the Goldman Sachs of China, will acquire the brokerage from Central Huijin Investment Ltd. for 16.7 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), the Beijing-based ...

  Bloomberg China’s third-largest lender tried to obscure the trail of dollar transactions by Russian, Chinese and Middle Eastern clients and attempted to silence a compliance officer who raised alarms about it, according to New York’s banking regulator. State-controlled Agricultural Bank of China was ordered to pay a $215 million penalty and install an independent monitor for 18 months to ...

  Bloomberg ING Group NV, the largest Dutch lender, climbed the most in three months in Amsterdam trading after third-quarter profit beat estimates. ING jumped as much as 4.2 percent in Amsterdam trading, the biggest gain since Aug. 3, and was priced at 12.02 euros as of 9:44 a.m. Net income rose 22 percent in the quarter as investment gains ...

  Paris/ AFP French bank Societe Generale served investors a pleasant surprise with third-quarter results, sending its shares soaring. Although falling by 2.4 percent to 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), net profit still came in well above analysts’ forecasts of 888 million euros according to Factset, a data provider. Shares in Societe Generale, France’s third largest bank after BNP Paribas ...