Banking

  Budapest / Reuters The scope for further cuts in the National Bank of Hungary’s record-low 1.2 percent base rate is increasingly limited, central bank Managing Director Barnabas Virag was quoted as saying on Saturday. “The room to further reduce the central bank’s base rate is increasingly limited,” Virag, who is not a rate-setter but is in charge of monetary ...

  Bloomberg Indonesia’s central bank said it will use the seven-day reverse repo rate as its benchmark policy instrument to help spur lending and support growth in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy. The new benchmark — which is the interest the central bank pays to borrow from commercial lenders, currently at 5.5 percent — will replace the 12-month reference rate of ...

  Reuters National Bank of Kuwait , the Gulf Arab state’s largest commercial lender, reported a 18.2 percent fall in first-quarter net profit, it said in a statement on Sunday, as it failed to repeat a one-off gain from an asset sale. The bank made a net profit of 78.9 million dinars ($261.6 million) in the three months to March ...

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) may have the freedom to pursue the most extreme forms of monetary financing should the economic situation warrant, Deutsche Bank AG said. “The ECB at face value faces the strictest legal obstacle to monetary financing, not least due to the historical inflation traumas experienced by member states,” analysts including London-based George Saravelos said ...

  Bloomberg The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has room to cut interest rates further below zero and is willing to increase the size of its balance sheet through currency intervention to prevent an already “significantly overvalued” franc from strengthening, President Thomas Jordan said. “There’s a willingness to intervene if necessary, and we can use our balance sheet if it makes ...

New York / AFP Citigroup joined the growing list of banks to boost reserves for bad energy loans, but said it saw no signs the energy bust was spreading to the broader economy. The US banking giant lifted its reserves for loan losses by $233 million due to energy-related loans as company officials signaled they expect further hits to results ...

  Bloomberg Kenya’s central bank is evaluating more than five offers from potential local and foreign suitors for Chase Bank Kenya Ltd., which was placed into receivership last week, Governor Patrick Njoroge said. The nation’s regulators were forced to step in with emergency support to stem depositor panic after the collapse last week of Chase Bank, the third lender to ...

  BLOOMBERG The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) weakened the daily yuan reference rate by the most in three months after the dollar strengthened. The central bank set the daily fixing of the local currency at 6.4891 to the dollar on Thursday, the lowest level in more than two weeks. The yuan in Shanghai fell 0.1 percent in a third ...

  Bloomberg Hungary’s central bank will review whether to remove incentives it has provided for commercial banks to buy government debt after yields plunged to record lows and government foreign-currency debt trail off. The National Bank of Hungary will reassess the need to continue providing interest-rate swap facilities to banks, Vice Governor Marton Nagy said in an article on Portfolio ...

WASHINGTON / Reuters The European Central Bank (ECB) is unhappy with the US dollar’s recent fall but accepts it as a natural consequence of the Federal Reserve’s cautious economic outlook and sees no reason to act to weaken the euro, three ECB sources said. A weaker dollar — it has shed 4 percent against the euro since the beginning of ...