Banking

  Bloomberg State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur and State Bank of Mysore shares surged for a second day as India approved the merger of the lenders with their parent, amid a government push to strengthen the nation’s fragmented banking industry. Bikaner Bank rose 18 percent in Mumbai to a five-month high, while SBM climbed 20 percent to the highest ...

  Bloomberg Japan’s main bank lobby hinted that the central bank was right to keep monetary stimulus unchanged, saying that sending negative interest rates even lower would hurt the industry. “The impact on banks would be more severe if negative rates are expanded,” Japanese Bankers Association Chairman Takeshi Kunibe said at a briefing in Tokyo hours after the decision. Japanese ...

  Bloomberg As well as a surging yen, non-existent inflation and a weak economy, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has something else to think about when deciding monetary policy this week— unhappy banks. Japan’s biggest lender, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd, has led the way in voicing concerns about the negative interest-rate regime introduced by Kuroda earlier this year. ...

  Bloomberg Poland’s largest lender PKO Bank Polski SA is planning to bid for Raiffeisen Bank International AG’s unit in the country, as the state-run company seeks to reinforce government efforts to boost domestic ownership of the financial industry, according to a person familiar with the process. Raiffeisen’s Polish assets, including its corporate banking unit, wouldn’t overlap much with PKO’s ...

  Bloomberg Nigeria plans to delay new capital rules for banks as regulators in Africa’s biggest economy follow fellow oil producer Kazakhstan in trying to boost lending and avoid a recession. The Central Bank of Nigeria in 2014 ordered the country’s lenders it considered too big to fail to boost minimum capital adequacy ratios to 16 percent from 15 percent ...

  Bloomberg Two decades ago Europe’s asset-backed securities (ABS) market was in its infancy. It has not aged gracefully. On a panel at the annual gathering of securitisation bankers in Barcelona, the industry’s old guard reminisced about how things were when they met for the very first time in Cork, Ireland in 1996. Securitisation, a technique for transforming groups of ...

  Bloomberg Two centuries after its creation, Norway’s central bank finds itself without any guide in history to help it tackle the challenges ahead. It has largely been forced to follow its bigger peers down a rabbit hole of ever lower interest rates to counter a ‘long-term’ global trend of slower growth, a global savings glut and weakening productivity, according ...

  Bloomberg The Federal Reserve’s liftoff from near-zero interest rates in December sparked angst over how quickly the central bank would start whittling down its US$2.5 trillion hoard of Treasuries. It turns out that investors in the world’s biggest bond market had little cause for concern. The weaker-than-forecast labour report for May wiped out bets that policy makers would follow ...

  Bloomberg India’s state-run banks will need more capital than promised by the government to boost credit growth as they grapple with bad loans of more than 4.7 trillion rupees (US$70 billion), the head of the nation’s largest lender said. “If you really want credit to speed up and infrastructure financing to take center stage then more capital is required ...

  Bloomberg Croatia’s central bank plans to raise its 2016 growth forecast next month, Governor Boris Vujcic said, acknowledging a faster-than-expected economic expansion that has helped temper the risks of a political crisis threatening to bring down the government. The central bank expects no review to the newest EU member state’s budget this year and fiscal consolidation will continue, said ...