Banking

  Bloomberg Citigroup Inc and Wells Fargo & Co reported second-quarter profit dropped from a year earlier as persistently low interest rates continued to squeeze lending margins. Citigroup reduced its forecast for net interest margin, the difference between what a bank charges for loans and pays depositors, while Wells Fargo said the UK’s vote to leave the European Union will ...

  Bloomberg A leading US banking regulator wants lenders to do more to manage their exposure to commercial real estate. As property lending accelerates, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — which oversees American banks alongside the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp — is actively monitoring banks’ stress tests and risk-management practices, Comptroller Thomas ...

  Bloomberg South Korea’s won rose to a two-month high after Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju Yeol kept interest rates at a record low and said the government’s stimulus will boost growth by about 0.2 percentage point. Policy makers voted unanimously to leave the seven-day repurchase rate at 1.25 percent, as expected by all 20 economists surveyed. While South ...

  Bloomberg Fullerton Financial Holdings Pte, an arm of Singapore state investment company Temasek Holdings Pte, has hired Yeo Hong Ping for a senior management role. Yeo is joining from JPMorgan Chase & Co, where he has worked since 2000, most recently as head of Singapore investment banking, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Yeo will start ...

  Bloomberg Not since 1998 has Russia’s central bank booked a loss, but that may be about to change. The bottomline will suffer because the Bank of Russia is becoming a net borrower from lenders for the first time since 2011 as deficit spending by the government sends rubles cascading through the system, according to VTB Capital and Renaissance Capital. ...

  Bloomberg The Bank of England left its key interest rate at a record low and signaled it’s readying stimulus for August as the economy reels from Britain’s decision to quit the European Union. The nine-member Monetary Policy Committee, led by Governor Mark Carney, voted 8-1 to keep the benchmark at 0.5 percent, with only Gertjan Vlieghe saying the outlook ...

  Bloomberg New Zealand’s central bank said it will issue an unscheduled assessment of the economy next week, prompting traders to increase bets on an interest-rate cut in August. The assessment, which will be published on July 21 and won’t include a review of the official cash rate, is being made because of a longer-than-usual period between policy decisions, the ...

  Bloomberg The US economy expanded at a modest pace since mid-May amid “slight” price pressures and some softening in consumer spending, according to a report from the Federal Reserve’s 12 districts that lacked any sense of urgency on the need to raise interest rates soon. “The outlook was generally positive across broad segments of the economy including retail sales, ...

  BLOOMBERG Indonesia’s Islamic bond yields have fallen faster than Malaysia’s in the past three months, as the nation’s higher-yielding notes do better at attracting investors fleeing plunging rates in the developed world. Yields on rupiah sukuk due 2019 slid 39 basis points in the period, compared with 26 basis points for equivalent paper in Malaysia. Indonesia’s three-year Islamic bonds ...

  Bloomberg UBS Group AG and Bank of America Merrill Lynch stand atop the private-banking industry, managing more than US$3 trillion for the world’s wealthiest people even as assets slid. The private bank at Zurich-based UBS oversaw US$1.74 trillion at the end of 2015, compared with US$1.75 trillion a year earlier, according to an annual study by London-based consulting firm ...