Banking

  Bloomberg Southeast Asia’s best-performing currency is giving Indonesia’s central bank the opportunity to continue increasing foreign reserves from a four-year high, a senior official said. “If we see the chance to build our reserves, then surely we will take advantage of it,” Doddy Zulverdi, Bank Indonesia’s executive director for monetary management, said in an interview at his Jakarta office ...

  DUBAI / DOHA / Reuters Qatar’s central bank is offering 3 billion riyals ($825 million) of government bonds in its third domestic bond sale this year, according to a circular seen by Reuters. Bids for the latest offer were due on Monday, with allocations to be made the following day, according to the offer document. The offer is made ...

  Kuwait City / AFP National Bank of Kuwait, the emirate’s largest lender, said on Monday its third quarter net profit rose 6.5 percent mainly thanks to growing public spending despite low oil revenues. The bank posted a net profit of 68.7 million dinars ($227.5 million) for July to September this year compared to 64.5 million dinars ($213.6 million) for ...

  Bloomberg ICICI Bank Ltd., India’s largest private-sector bank, rose the most in six months in Mumbai stock trading on optimism the lender will recover some of its loans to the Essar Group. Shares of the bank rose 6.5 percent to 257.55 rupees, while the locally listed stock of Standard Chartered Plc, also owed money by Essar, gained 2 percent. ...

  Bloomberg Morgan Stanley is abandoning a prediction that U.S. break-even rates will fall as the outlook for prices in the world’s biggest economy surge to the highest level in five months. The yield difference between 30-year Treasury bonds and similar-maturity inflation-protected securities headed for the highest closing level since May. The measure, an outlook for consumer prices known as ...

  Bloomberg China Construction Bank Corp., the nation’s second-largest lender, said it agreed to form an almost 5 billion yuan ($743 million) debt-to-equity pact with Yunnan Tin Group. The agreement is part of a larger 10-billion yuan framework the two companies signed to cut Yunnan Tin’s debt ratio, the Beijing-based lender said in a statement on its website on Sunday. ...

  Bloomberg The Serbian central bank left borrowing costs unchanged for a third month, disregarding an unexpected inflation slowdown and watching out for the dinar’s reaction to the increasing prospects of an interest-rate increase in the U.S. The National Bank of Serbia left the benchmark one-week repurchase rate at 4 percent, according to a statement on its website. Twenty-one of ...

  DUBAI / Reuters National Commercial Bank (NCB) missed analysts’ forecasts on Sunday by reporting a 1.6 percent fall in third-quarter net profit, as Saudi Arabia’s largest listed lender provided more evidence that a weaker economy is hurting the banking sector. Banks in the kingdom are feeling the pinch as depressed oil prices slow economic growth to its lowest level ...

  Reuters JPMorgan Chase & Co, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, reported a 7.6 percent drop in quarterly profit after recording a tax expense, compared with a rare tax benefit a year earlier. The bank’s net income fell to $6.29 billion in the third quarter ended Sept. 30 from $6.80 billion in the same quarter of 2015. Earnings per ...

  Frankfurt / AFP European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi will be under pressure this week to clarify the bank’s stimulus plans after investors were spooked by talk of an end to its massive bond-buying programme. The ECB governing council is not expected to make any changes to its ultra-loose monetary policy at its regular meeting on Thursday, keeping interest ...