Banking

Beijing / AFP China’s bank loans plunged in February from January, the central bank said, despite government efforts to encourage lending to keep the world’s second-largest economy from slowing. New loans extended by banks slid to 726.6 billion yuan ($112 billion), the People’s Bank of China said, a massive drop from January’s record 2.51 trillion yuan lending surge. The figure ...

BLOOMBERG Gazprom PJSC, the natural-gas export monopoly, has hired banks to organise a sale of Swiss-franc debt in what could be the first Eurobond deal out of Russia this year. Europe’s biggest gas supplier picked Deutsche Bank AG, Gazprombank JSC and UBS Group AG as joint lead managers and Renaissance Capital as a co-manager for investor update meetings in Geneva ...

FRANKFURT / Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG, which runs Europe’s biggest investment bank, said it expects the industry’s revenue to decline this year as clients consider pulling back from trading some fixed-income securities and refrain from doing deals. Securities firms will see debt trading revenue fall “slightly” from a year earlier as “an increase in macro revenues due to monetary policy ...

FRANKFURT / Bloomberg The next target for the European Central Bank’s (ECB) expanding asset-purchase programme will be the region’s 900 billion-euro ($980 billion) corporate-bond market. The ECB will buy investment-grade euro-denominated bonds issued by non-bank corporations established in the euro area. Corporate bonds are the latest assets to be added to a growing list of securities, from government debt to ...

Frankfurt / AFP European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi said that while chronically weak loan growth in the euro area “has been recovering for quite some time, it is still too low.” In the wake of the eurozone’s financial and debt crisis, banks became wary of lending money to households and businesses for fear of a possible default, preferring ...

Bloomberg Foreign banks including HSBC Holdings Plc and Deutsche Bank AG are pushing back against the Federal Reserve’s proposals on implementing rules designed to end too-big-to-fail, saying they are burdensome and unfair to the US units of the world’s biggest lenders. Under the Fed’s proposals, US units of foreign banks affected would need an extra layer of debt available to ...

BLOOMBERG Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the country’s largest lender by assets, awarded David McKay C$10.9 million ($8.2 million) for fiscal 2015, his first full year as chief executive officer, 44 percent more than the previous year. McKay, 52, received a salary of C$1.3 million, share-based awards of C$5.8 million, C$1.45 million of stock options, C$2.33 million in incentive pay ...

BLOOMBERG Stocks traders put declines in Asia behind them as European markets rose with U.S. index futures and commodities. Government bonds fell, gold slid and the euro weakened. European shares advanced for the first time in three days on speculation the region’s central bank will ramp up monetary stimulus on Thursday. A gauge of raw materials rebounded from its biggest ...

London / Bloomberg Three UK banks, led by HSBC Holdings Plc, will have $77 billion of new loss-absorbing debt to meet requirements of the European Union and the Bank of England, Moody’s Investors Service said. Barclays Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and HSBC will have to issue new debt to comply with the EU’s ‘minimum requirement for own ...

BLOOMBERG Citigroup Inc. joined US rivals in signalling another dismal start to the trading year, spurring a slide in Wall Street bank stocks. First-quarter revenue from fixed-income and equity trading will probably drop 15 percent, Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said during an investor presentation. That would make 2016 the fourth straight year that the company’s revenues from those operations ...