Banking

  Bloomberg Indonesia’s central bank has paused its monetary policy easing ahead of adopting a new benchmark interest rate in August aimed at spurring lending and growth in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy. Governor Agus Martowardojo and his board kept the reference rate at 6.75 percent, Bank Indonesia said Thursday, in line with the forecasts of 23 of the 26 economists ...

  Reuters Oman has chosen five banks to arrange the sultanate’s first international bond issue in almost 20 years, sources aware of the matter said on Thursday. The upcoming US dollar-denominated issue comes as Oman, like other Gulf states, looks to tap international bond markets to shore up state finances pressured by low oil prices. Oman has chosen Citi, JP ...

  Bloomberg Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the country’s largest mortgage lender, has tightened criteria for home loans to foreigners just as the central bank warned buying by Chinese posed an ‘indirect risk’. Commonwealth Bank, which accounts for one in every four mortgages in the country, will no longer approve applications that cite self-employed foreign income, it said in a note ...

  Bloomberg Commerzbank AG Chief Executive Officer Martin Blessing said a “slow” first quarter will make it more difficult to achieve last year’s profit, just a month after the bank projected an increase in full-year earnings. “The result for the first three months is likely to be lower than in the previous quarter,” Blessing, 52, told shareholders at the annual ...

  Bloomberg The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) used open-market operations to inject the most funds in two weeks, helping meet a seasonal spike in demand for cash that also saw the central bank provide two rounds of medium-term loans within a week. The PBOC auctioned 90 billion yuan ($14 billion) of seven-day reverse-repurchase agreements on Tuesday, the most since ...

  New York / AFP Goldman Sachs reported a sharp decline in first-quarter earnings, but gave a fairly bullish outlook for the mergers and acquisitions business now that financial markets have stabilised. Earnings for the quarter ending March 31 were $1.2 billion, down 56.3 percent from the year-ago period. Revenues sank 40.3 percent to $6.3 billion. Nearly all of the big ...

  Tokyo / Reuters Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said inflation could be affected if the yen continued to rise excessively, leading to further easing measures to meet the central bank’s price target, the Wall Street Journal reported. Kuroda also told the paper that the BOJ was not targetting the exchange rate but that he would continue to ...

  Seoul / Reuters South Korea’s central bank kept interest rates untouched on Tuesday for a 10th straight month, and its governor stressed that the current rate level supports economic growth, although a lowered growth forecast for this year kept expectations of a rate cut alive. The Bank of Korea (BOK) committee held its base rate steady at 1.50 percent, ...

  Bloomberg The strengthening krona may force Sweden’s central bank to add stimulus again as criticism mounts that its unprecedented policy moves are threatening stability in the largest Nordic economy. While all 20 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg predict that the main rate will be kept unchanged at a record low of minus 0.5 percent, the Riksbank may extend its government ...

  Reuters Samba Financial Group, Saudi Arabia’s third-largest bank by assets, reported a 1.4 percent drop in first-quarter net profit on Tuesday, in line with analyst forecasts. The bank made a profit of 1.26 billion riyals ($336.1 million) in the three months to March 31, down from 1.28 billion riyals in the same period a year earlier, it said in ...