Banking

  Bloomberg The Bank of England will take responsibility for a U.K. benchmark measure of overnight funding rates as officials seek to prevent a recurrence of the rigging scandals since the global financial crisis. The BOE will provide oversight and governance for the Sterling Overnight Index Average, or Sonia, from April 25, it said in a statement released Wednesday. The ...

  Bloomberg The business of trading stocks has claimed another scalp this year. Nomura is shuttering its equities division in Europe, hot on the heels of Barclays’ pullback from Asian equities. The Japanese bank hadn’t cracked the top 10 list in Europe, and Barclays had failed to do the same in Asia. They won’t be the last to scale back ...

Bloomberg Italian officials and bank executives agreed to create a multibillion-euro fund to help troubled lenders raise capital and offload bad loans, as the nation tries to assuage investor jitters. The new vehicle will be named Atlante, private fund manager Quaestio Capital Management SGR said late Monday. It will be financed by banks, insurers and institutional investors including Cassa Depositi ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank is studying the mechanics of scrapping the euro area’s largest denomination note, though it hasn’t yet made a decision. President Mario Draghi said in February that policy makers are examining the controversial 500-euro ($571) bill amid concern it aids criminal activity and terrorist financing. Doris Schneeberger, head of the currency management division at the Frankfurt-based ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan is reducing the share of funds financial institutions keep at the BOJ that will be subject to the new negative interest rate policy. Enacting a technical adjustment that the central bank indicated was a possibility when it unveiled the new policy in January, the BOJ enlarged the share of new current-account funds that will be ...

Bloomberg Instead of an orderly burial, the wind-down of an Austrian bank is turning into a scene from The Walking Dead. Seven years on from the bailout of Hypo Alpe Aldria Bank, private investors and politicians are still at loggerheads over who should foot the bill. While Hypo Group itself is no more, Heta, the “bad bank” designed to wind ...

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc is seeking to sell at least $4.4 billion of assets in Asia, people with knowledge of the matter said, as the lender pares its balance sheet after booking record impairments. The London-based bank is speaking with potential buyers for about $1.4 billion of stressed loans made to Indian firms including GMR Infrastructure Ltd., according to the ...

Bloomberg Reserve Bank of India(RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan is going all out to build up the nation’s foreign-exchange reserves as he seeks to augment the rupee’s defenses. The stockpile grew to an unprecedented $359.76 billion in the week to April 1, Reserve Bank of India data showed. The reserves surged as Governor Raghuram Rajan bought dollars to take advantage of ...

Bloomberg The world’s central bankers, already hitting limits of their effectiveness on growth and inflation, are now contending with another risk: that additional stimulus could produce lackluster results and undercut investor confidence. The Bank of Japan’s decision in January to take interest rates negative has sent bond yields tumbling, while doing little to curb a surging yen that’s squeezing the ...

Washington / Reuters The World Bank said on Monday it expects its nonmarket rate lending to top $43 billion in the current fiscal year as developing countries face economic headwinds, bringing its total for the past four years to more than $150 billion. The multilateral lender said its International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Association (IDA) ...