Banking

  Bloomberg China’s $3.2 trillion corporate bond market is already starting to reel from rising interbank borrowing costs, and the traditional year-end funding crunch hasn’t even started yet. The yield premium for five-year AA rated notes over the sovereign climbed 10 basis points in October as money market rates surged to an 18-month high. Worse may be yet to come ...

  Bloomberg A rally for Chinese banks listed in Hong Kong has cut their price gap to mainland shares in half — and that seems about as much as investors are willing to tolerate. In the five months through September, a gauge of the big four lenders’ Hong Kong shares jumped 15 percent as southbound cash poured into the stocks, ...

  Bloomberg Bank of China’s (BOC) top official in New York said he’s boosting compliance efforts amid a US crackdown on illicit money moves that already led to a $215 million penalty against Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. “From the perspective of regulation, the U.S. is the toughest,” Xu Chen, chief executive officer and president of Bank of China’s New ...

Bloomberg Credit Agricole SA, France’s third-largest bank, said quarterly profit doubled from a year earlier as it booked gains from a reorganization and bond-trading income surged. The lender also pledged a stable or rising dividend for next year. Net income climbed to 1.86 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in the third quarter, the bank said in a statement on Tuesday, in ...

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 ...