Banking

Bloomberg The popularity of Malaysia’s ringgit and Indonesia’s rupiah among global investors has made them Southeast Asia’s most volatile currencies, just as the region heads for troubled waters. Already reeling from a commodity slump, debt in the two nations is seen by strategists as the most vulnerable to concerns surrounding the U.S. presidential election and the Federal Reserve’s next interest-rate ...

  Bloomberg As Greek banks struggle to clean up their balance sheets of bad loans, investors have been left pondering another uncertainty: Who will lead the country’s biggest lenders? The General Council of Greece’s bank recapitalization fund, HFSF, discusses whether to call an extraordinary meeting of National Bank of Greece shareholders aimed at forcing the lender’s chief executive officer, Leonidas ...

  Hong Kong / AFP HSBC shares rallied on Monday in a positive response to quarterly profit results after the British banking giant underwent a radical cost-cutting exercise. In the three months to September its adjusted pre-tax profit — which strips out one-off items and unfavourable currency movements — rose seven percent from a year earlier to $5.59 billion, beating ...

  Bloomberg Tesco Bank, the lending arm of the UK’s biggest grocer, said it suspended online transactions after about 20,000 customers had money fraudulently taken from their accounts. About 40,000 of the bank’s 136,000 checking account holders experienced suspicious transactions over the weekend, Tesco Bank Chief Executive Officer Benny Higgins told BBC Radio 4’s Today program. About half of those ...

  Sydney / AFP Australian banking giant Westpac posted a seven percent slide in annual net profit on Monday on the back of market headwinds and impairment charges but said it was well positioned with a strong balance sheet. Westpac’s Aus$7.45 billion (US$5.72 billion) result in the year to September 30 rounded out annual reporting from three of the nation’s ...

  TOKYO / AP Japanese telecommunications and internet company SoftBank Group Corp., which has acquired British chipmaker ARM Holdings for about $30 billion, reported on Monday that its July-September profit more than doubled from the same period the previous year. Tokyo-based Softbank’s fiscal second quarter profit totaled 528.6 billion yen ($5.1 billion), up from 258.6 billion yen last year, boosted ...

  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 ...